tches as many do report that thou
didst relate, or did not some person teach thee to say such things of
thyself?' But the two men did pluck the boy from me, and said he had
been examined by two able justices of peace, and they never asked him
such a question. To whom I replied, 'The persons accused had the more
wrong.'" The boy afterwards acknowledged, in his more advanced years,
that he was instructed and suborned to swear these things against the
accused persons by his father and others, and was heard often to confess
that on the day which he pretended to see the said witches at the house
or barn, he was gathering plums in a neighbour's orchard.[56]

[Footnote 56: Webster on Witchcraft, edition 1677, p. 278.]

There was now approaching a time when the law against witchcraft,
sufficiently bloody in itself, was to be pushed to more violent
extremities than the quiet scepticism of the Church of England clergy
gave way to. The great Civil War had been preceded and anticipated by
the fierce disputes of the ecclesiastical parties. The rash and
ill-judged attempt to enforce upon the Scottish a compliance with the
government and ceremonies of the High Church divines, and the severe
prosecutions in the Star Chamber and Prerogative Courts, had given the
Presbyterian system for a season a great degree of popularity in
England; and as the King's party declined during the Civil War, and the
state of church-government was altered, the influence of the Calvinistic
divines increased. With much strict morality and pure practice of
religion, it is to be regretted these were still marked by unhesitating
belief in the existence of sorcery, and a keen desire to extend and
enforce the legal penalties against it. Wier has considered the clergy
of every sect as being too eager in this species of persecution: _Ad
gravem hanc impietatem, connivent theologi plerique omnes_. But it is
not to be denied that the Presbyterian ecclesiastics who, in Scotland,
were often appointed by the Privy Council Commissioners for the trial of
witchcraft, evinced a very extraordinary degree of credulity in such
cases, and that the temporary superiority of the same sect in England
was marked by enormous cruelties of this kind. To this general error we
must impute the misfortune that good men, such as Calamy and Baxter,
should have countenanced or defended such proceedings as those of the
impudent and cruel wretch called Matthew Hopkins, who, in those
unsettled ti