same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it
one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
Hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my cat
upon the ground, I looked up to heaven; and was as if I had with the
eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as
being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten
me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices."

[Sidenote: Belief in witchcraft.]

The vivid sense of a supernatural world which breathes through words
such as these, the awe and terror with which it pressed upon the life of
men, found their most terrible expression in the belief in witchcraft.
The dread of Satanic intervention indeed was not peculiar to the
Puritan. It had come down from the earliest ages of the Christian
Church, and had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the
Middle Ages by the physical calamities and moral scepticism which threw
their gloom over the world. Joan of Arc was a witch to every Englishman,
and the wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester paced the streets of London,
candle in hand, as a convicted sorceress. But it was not till the chaos
and turmoil of the Reformation put their strain on the spiritual
imagination of men that the belief in demoniacal possession deepened
into a general panic. The panic was common to both Catholics and
Protestants; it was in Catholic countries indeed that the persecution of
supposed witches was carried on longest and most ruthlessly. Among
Protestant countries England was the last to catch the general terror;
and the Act of 1541, the first English statute passed against
witchcraft, was far milder in tone than the laws of any other European
country. Witchcraft itself, where no death could be proved to have
followed from it, was visited only with pillory and imprisonment; where
death had issued from it, the penalty was the gallows and not the stake.
Even this statute was repealed in the following reign. But the fierce
religious strife under Mary roused a darker fanaticism; and when
Elizabeth mounted the throne preacher after preacher assured her that a
multitude of witches filled the land. "Witches and sorcerers," cried
Bishop Jewel, "within these few years are marvellously