old women by piercing them with pins and needles,
declared that county to be infested with witches. Thereupon Parliament
issued a commission, and sent two eminent Presbyterian divines to
accompany it, with the result that in that county alone sixty persons
were hanged for witchcraft in a single year. In Scotland matters were
even worse. The auto da fe of Spain was celebrated in Scotland under
another name, and with Presbyterian ministers instead of Roman Catholic
priests as the main attendants. At Leith, in 1664, nine women were
burned together. Condemnations and punishments of women in batches were
not uncommon. Torture was used far more freely than in England, both in
detecting witches and in punishing them. The natural argument developed
in hundreds of pulpits was this: If the Allwise God punishes his
creatures with tortures infinite in cruelty and duration, why should not
his ministers, as far as they can, imitate him?

The strongest minds in both branches of the Protestant Church in Great
Britain devoted themselves to maintaining the superstition. The newer
scientific modes of thought, and especially the new ideas regarding the
heavens, revealed first by Copernicus and Galileo and later by Newton,
Huygens, and Halley, were gradually dissipating the whole domain of the
Prince of the Power of the Air; but from first to last a long line of
eminent divines, Anglican and Calvinistic, strove to resist the new
thought. On the Anglican side, in the seventeenth century, Meric
Casaubon, Doctor of Divinity and a high dignitary of Canterbury,--Henry
More, in many respects the most eminent scholar in the
Church,--Cudworth, by far the most eminent philosopher, and Dr. Joseph
Glanvil, the most cogent of all writers in favour of witchcraft,
supported the orthodox superstition in treatises of great power; and Sir
Matthew Hale, the greatest jurist of the period, condemning two women
to be burned for witchcraft, declared that he based his judgment on the
direct testimony of Holy Scripture. On the Calvinistic side were the
great names of Richard Baxter, who applauded some of the worst cruelties
in England, and of Increase and Cotton Mather, who stimulated the worst
in America; and these marshalled in behalf of this cruel superstition
a long line of eminent divines, the most earnest of all, perhaps, being
John Wesley.

Nor was the Lutheran Church in Sweden and the other Scandinavian
countries behind its sister churches, either in pers