rers, chiefly because
it was the object to transfer the odium of these crimes to the
Waldenses, and excite and direct the public hatred against the new sect
by confounding their doctrines with the influences of the devil and his
fiends. The bull of Pope Innocent was afterwards, in the year 1523,
enforced by Adrian VI. with a new one, in which excommunication was
directed against _sorcerers and heretics_.

While Rome thus positively declared herself against witches and
sorcerers, the Calvinists, in whose numbers must be included the greater
part of the English Puritans, who, though they had not finally severed
from the communion of the Anglican Church, yet disapproved of her ritual
and ceremonies as retaining too much of the Papal stamp, ranked
themselves, in accordance with their usual policy, in diametrical
opposition to the doctrine of the Mother Church. They assumed in the
opposite sense whatever Rome pretended to as a proof of her omnipotent
authority. The exorcisms, forms, and rites, by which good Catholics
believed that incarnate fiends could be expelled and evil spirits of
every kind rebuked--these, like the holy water, the robes of the priest,
and the sign of the cross, the Calvinists considered either with scorn
and contempt as the tools of deliberate quackery and imposture, or with
horror and loathing, as the fit emblems and instruments of an idolatrous
system.

Such of them as did not absolutely deny the supernatural powers of which
the Romanists made boast, regarded the success of the exorcising priest,
to whatever extent they admitted it, as at best a casting out of devils
by the power of Beelzebub, the King of the Devils. They saw also, and
resented bitterly, the attempt to confound any dissent from the
doctrines of Rome with the proneness to an encouragement of rites of
sorcery. On the whole, the Calvinists, generally speaking, were of all
the contending sects the most suspicious of sorcery, the most undoubting
believers in its existence, and the most eager to follow it up with what
they conceived to be the due punishment of the most fearful of crimes.

The leading divines of the Church of England were, without doubt,
fundamentally as much opposed to the doctrines of Rome as those who
altogether disclaimed opinions and ceremonies merely because she had
entertained them. But their position in society tended strongly to keep
them from adopting, on such subjects as we are now discussing, either
the eager