-The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of
persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life
to assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;--and the
patient and inquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for
the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound, with gratified
attention to stories of witches at Oxford and devils at Mascon."[90] In
the Church and amongst the more notoriously "religious" men of the time
it was worse. In Archbishop Cranmer's 'Articles of Visitation' (1549) is
this clause:--"You shall enquire whether you know of any that use Charms,
Sorcery, Enchantments, Soothsaying, or any like Craft invented by the
Devil;" and Bishop Jewel, preaching before Queen Elizabeth (1558),
informed her how that "witches and sorcerers within these last few years
are marvellously increased in your Grace's realm. Your Grace's subjects
pine away even unto their death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth,
their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft; I pray God they never
practise further than upon the subject.... These eyes have seen most
evident and manifest marks of their wickedness." At the next Parliament
the new Bill against the detestable sin of witchcraft was passed, and
Strype says, partly on account of the Lord Bishop's earnest objurgation.
Dalton's[91] 'Country Justice' (1655) shows to what a pass, a century
later, witchcraft had come in credulous England. Truly Scot was right
when he said that his greatest adversaries were "young ignorance and old
customs." They have always been the greatest adversaries of all truth. Of
late, thank God, the march of humanity has been steadily, if slowly,
towards the daylight; but at present you and I, my reader, have to do with
the most debasing superstition that ever afflicted history, in the matter
of those poor wretched servants of the devil--those witches and wizards,
who somehow managed to lose on all sides--to suffer in time and be ruined
for eternity, and to get only ill-will and ill-usage from man and fiend
alike.

THE WITCH OF BERKELEY.

One of our earliest English witches, so early indeed that she becomes
mythical and misty and out of all possible proportion, was the celebrated
Witch of Berkeley,[92] who got the reward of her sins in the middle of the
ninth century, leaving behind her a tremendous lesson, by which, however,
after generations did not much profit. The witch had