even most of whom have, by their judicial
confessions, acknowledged their guilt and the justice of their
punishment? It is a strange scepticism, they might add, which rejects
the evidence of Scripture, of human legislature, and of the accused
persons themselves.

Notwithstanding these specious reasons, the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were periods when the revival of learning, the invention of
printing, the fearless investigations of the Reformers into subjects
thought formerly too sacred for consideration of any save the clergy,
had introduced a system of doubt, enquiry, disregard of authority, when
unsupported by argument, and unhesitating exercise of the private
judgment, on subjects which had occupied the bulls of popes and decrees
of councils. In short, the spirit of the age was little disposed to
spare error, however venerable, or countenance imposture, however
sanctioned by length of time and universal acquiescence. Learned writers
arose in different countries to challenge the very existence of this
imaginary crime, to rescue the reputation of the great men whose
knowledge, superior to that of their age, had caused them to be
suspected of magic, and to put a stop to the horrid superstition whose
victims were the aged, ignorant, and defenceless, and which could only
be compared to that which sent victims of old through the fire to
Moloch.

The courageous interposition of those philosophers who opposed science
and experience to the prejudices of superstition and ignorance, and in
doing so incurred much misrepresentation, and perhaps no little
ill-will, in the cause of truth and humanity, claim for them some
distinction in a work on Demonology. The pursuers of exact science to
its coy retreats, were sure to be the first to discover that the most
remarkable phenomena in Nature are regulated by certain fixed laws, and
cannot rationally be referred to supernatural agency, the sufficing
cause to which superstition attributes all that is beyond her own narrow
power of explanation. Each advance in natural knowledge teaches us that
it is the pleasure of the Creator to govern the world by the laws which
he has imposed, and which are not in our times interrupted or suspended.

The learned Wier, or Wierus, was a man of great research in physical
science, and studied under the celebrated Cornelius Agrippa, against
whom the charge of sorcery was repeatedly alleged by Paulus Jovius and
other authors, while he suffered,