onicles
xxxviii.) that he caused his children to pass through the fire, observed
times, used enchantments and witchcraft, and dealt with familiar spirits
and with wizards. These passages seem to concur with the former, in
classing witchcraft among other desertions of the prophets of the Deity,
in order to obtain responses by the superstitious practices of the pagan
nations around them. To understand the texts otherwise seems to confound
the modern system of witchcraft, with all its unnatural and improbable
outrages on common sense, with the crime of the person who, in classical
days, consulted the oracle of Apollo--a capital offence in a Jew, but
surely a venial sin in an ignorant and deluded pagan.

To illustrate the nature of the Hebrew witch and her prohibited criminal
traffic, those who have written on this subject have naturally dwelt
upon the interview between Saul and the Witch of Endor, the only
detailed and particular account of such a transaction which is to be
found in the Bible; a fact, by the way, which proves that the crime of
witchcraft (capitally punished as it was when discovered) was not
frequent among the chosen people, who enjoyed such peculiar
manifestations of the Almighty's presence. The Scriptures seem only to
have conveyed to us the general fact (being what is chiefly edifying) of
the interview between the witch and the King of Israel. They inform us
that Saul, disheartened and discouraged by the general defection of his
subjects, and the consciousness of his own unworthy and ungrateful
disobedience, despairing of obtaining an answer from the offended Deity,
who had previously communicated with him through his prophets, at length
resolved, in his desperation, to go to a divining woman, by which course
he involved himself in the crime of the person whom he thus consulted,
against whom the law denounced death--a sentence which had been often
executed by Saul himself on similar offenders. Scripture proceeds to
give us the general information that the king directed the witch to call
up the Spirit of Samuel, and that the female exclaimed that gods had
arisen out of the earth--that Saul, more particularly requiring a
description of the apparition (whom, consequently, he did not himself
see), she described it as the figure of an old man with a mantle. In
this figure the king acknowledges the resemblance of Samuel, and sinking
on his face, hears from the apparition, speaking in the character of the
prop