for a period of two centuries and a
half, brooded upon the idea, not only that parted spirits walked the earth
to meddle in the affairs of men, but that men had power to summon evil
spirits to their aid to work woe upon their fellows. An epidemic terror
seized upon the nations; no man thought himself secure, either in his
person or possessions, from the machinations of the devil and his agents.
Every calamity that befell him he attributed to a witch. If a storm arose
and blew down his barn, it was witchcraft; if his cattle died of a
murrain--if disease fastened upon his limbs, or death entered suddenly and
snatched a beloved face from his hearth--they were not visitations of
Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag, whose wretchedness or
insanity caused the ignorant to raise their finger and point at her as a
witch. The word was upon every body's tongue. France, Italy, Germany,
England, Scotland, and the far north successively ran mad upon this
subject, and for a long series of years furnished their tribunals with so
many trials for witchcraft, that other crimes were seldom or never spoken
of. Thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons fell victims to this cruel
and absurd delusion. In many cities of Germany, as will be shewn more
fully in its due place hereafter, the average number of executions for
this pretended crime was six hundred annually, or two every day, if we
leave out the Sundays, when it is to be supposed that even this madness
refrained from its work.

A misunderstanding of the famous text of the Mosaic law, "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live," no doubt led many conscientious men astray, whose
superstition, warm enough before, wanted but a little corroboration to
blaze out with desolating fury. In all ages of the world men have tried to
hold converse with superior beings, and to pierce by their means the
secrets of futurity. In the time of Moses, it is evident that there were
impostors who trafficked upon the credulity of mankind, and insulted the
supreme majesty of the true God by pretending to the power of divination.
Hence the law which Moses, by Divine command, promulgated against these
criminals; but it did not follow, as the superstitious monomaniacs of the
middle ages imagined, that the Bible established the existence of the
power of divination by its edicts against those who pretended to it. From
the best authorities, it appears that the Hebrew word, which has been
rendered _venefica