ecuting witchcraft
or in repressing doubts regarding the doctrine which supported it.

But in spite of all these great authorities in every land, in spite of
such summary punishments as those of Flade, Loos, and Bekker, and in
spite of the virtual exclusion from church preferment of all who doubted
the old doctrine, the new scientific view of the heavens was developed
more and more; the physical sciences were more and more cultivated; the
new scientific atmosphere in general more and more prevailed; and at the
end of the seventeenth century this vast growth of superstition began to
wither and droop. Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire in France, Thomasius in
Germany, Calef in New England, and Beccaria in Italy, did much also to
create an intellectual and moral atmosphere fatal to it.

And here it should be stated, to the honour of the Church of England,
that several of her divines showed great courage in opposing the
dominant doctrine. Such men as Harsnet, Archbishop of York, and Morton,
Bishop of Lichfield, who threw all their influence against witch-finding
cruelties even early in the seventeenth century, deserve lasting
gratitude. But especially should honour be paid to the younger men in
the Church, who wrote at length against the whole system: such men as
Wagstaffe and Webster and Hutchinson, who in the humbler ranks of the
clergy stood manfully for truth, with the certainty that by so doing
they were making their own promotion impossible.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the doctrine was evidently
dying out. Where torture had been abolished, or even made milder,
"weather-makers" no longer confessed, and the fundamental proofs in
which the system was rooted were evidently slipping away. Even the great
theologian Fromundus, at the University of Louvain, the oracle of his
age, who had demonstrated the futility of the Copernican theory, had
foreseen this and made the inevitable attempt at compromise, declaring
that devils, though OFTEN, are not ALWAYS or even for the most part
the causes of thunder. The learned Jesuit Caspar Schott, whose Physica
Curiosa was one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century,
also ventured to make the same mild statement. But even such concessions
by such great champions of orthodoxy did not prevent frantic efforts in
various quarters to bring the world back under the old dogma: as late as
1743 there was published in Catholic Germany a manual by Father Vincent
of Berg, i