1712 Jane Wenham, a poor woman belonging to the village of Walkern, in the county of Hertford, was solemnly found guilty by the jury on the evidence of sixteen witnesses, of whom three were clergymen; Judge Powell presiding. She was condemned to death as a witch in the usual manner; but was reprieved on the representation of the judge. She had been commonly known in the neighbourhood of her home as a malicious witch, who took great pleasure in afflicting farmers' cattle and in effecting similar mischief. The incumbent of Walkern, the Rev. Mr. Gardiner, fully shared the prejudice of his parishioners; and, far from attempting to dispel, he entirely concurred with, their suspicions. A warrant was obtained from the magistrate, Sir Henry Chauncy, for the arrest of the accused: and she was brought before that local official; depositions were taken, and she was searched for 'marks.' The vicar of Ardley, a neighbouring village, tested her guilt or innocence with the Lord's Prayer, which was repeated incorrectly: by threats and other means he forced the confession that she was indeed an agent of the devil, and had had intercourse with him.
But, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, witches were occasionally tried and condemned by judicial tribunals. In the year 1749, Maria or Emma Renata, a nun in the convent of Unterzell, near Würzburg, was condemned by the spiritual, and executed by the civil, power. By the clemency of the prince, the proper death by burning alive was remitted to the milder sentence of beheading, and afterwards burning the corpse to ashes: for no vestige of such an accursed criminal should be permitted to remain after death. When a young girl Maria Renata had been seduced to witchcraft by a military officer, and was accustomed to attend the witch-assemblies. In the convent she practised her infernal arts in bewitching her sister-nuns.162 About the same time a nun in the south of France was subjected to the barbarous imputation and treatment of a witch: Father Girard, discovering that his mistress had some extraordinary scrofulous marks, conceived the idea of proclaiming to the world that she was possessed of the stigmata—impressions of the marks of the nails and spear on the crucified Lord, believed to be reproduced on the persons of those who, like the celebrated St. Francis, most nearly assimilated their lives to His. The Jesuits eagerly embraced an opportunity of producing a miracle which might confound their Jansenist rivals, whose sensational miracles were threatening to eclipse their own.163 Sir Walter Scott states that the last judicial sentence of death for witchcraft in Scotland was executed in 1722, when Captain David Ross, sheriff of Sutherland, condemned a woman to the stake. As for illegal persecution, M. Garinet ('Histoire de la Magie en France') gives a list of upwards of twenty instances occurring in France between the years 1805 and 1818. In the latter year three tribunals were occupied with the trials of the murderers.
If a belief should be entertained that the now 'vulgar' ideas of witchcraft have been long obsolete in England, it would be destroyed by a perusal of a few of the newspapers and periodicals of the last hundred years; and a sufficiently voluminous work might be occupied with the achievements of modern Sidrophels, and the records of murders or mutilations perpetrated by an ignorant mob.164
Nor would it be safe to assume, with some writers, that diabolism, as a vulgar prejudice, is now entirely extirpated from Protestant Christendom, and survives only in the most orthodox countries of Catholicism or in the remoter parts of northern or eastern Europe. Superstition, however mitigated, exists even in the freer Protestant lands of Europe and America; and if Protestants are able to smile at the religious creeds or observances of other sects, they may have, it is probable, something less pernicious, but perhaps almost as absurd, in their own creed.165 But, after a despotism of fifteen centuries, Christendom has at length thrown off the hellish yoke, whose horrid tyranny was satiated with innumerable holocausts. The once tremendous power of the infernal arts is remembered by the higher classes of society of the present age only in their proverbial language, but it is indelibly graven in the common literature of Europe. With the savage peoples of the African continent and of the barbarous regions of the globe, witchcraft or sorcery, under the name of Fetishism, flourishes with as much vigour and with as destructive effects as in Europe in the sixteenth century; and every traveller returning from Eastern or Western Africa, or from the South Pacific, testifies to the prevalence of the practice of horrid and bloody rites of a religious observance consisting of charms and incantations. With those peoples that have no further conception of the religious sentiment there obtains for the most part, at least, the magical use of sorcery.166 Superstition, ever varying, at some future date may assume, even in Europe, a form as pernicious or irrational as any of a past or of the present age; for in every age 'religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us as rational creatures above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational and more senseless than beasts themselves.'167
157. A phenomenon of apparently the same sort as that which was of such frequent occurrence in the Middle Age and in the seventeenth century, is said to have been lately occupying considerable attention in the South of France. The Courrier des Alpes narrates an extraordinary scene in one of the churches in the Commune of Morzine, among the women, on occasion of the visitation of the bishop of the district. It seems that the malady in question attacks, for the most part, the female population, and the patients are confidently styled, and asserted to be, possessed. It 'produces all the effects of madness, without having its character,' and is said to baffle all the resources of medical science, which is ignorant of its nature. There had been an intermission of the convulsions for some time, but they have now reappeared with greater violence than ever.—The Times newspaper, June 6, 1864.
158. 'Rara avis in terris.' A mongrel and anomalous species like the German Meerkatzen—monkey-cats.
159. If, however, individuals of the human species were at length exempt from the penalty of death, those of the canine species were sacrificed, perhaps vicariously. Two dogs, convicted, as it is reported, of being accessories, were solemnly hanged!
160. Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, chap. xxxi. The faith of the Fellow of Harvard College, we may be inclined to suppose, was quickened in proportion to his doubts. To do him justice, he admitted that some of the circumstances alleged might be exaggerated or even imaginary.
161. Dr. Balthazar Becker, theological professor at Amsterdam, published his heretical work in Dutch, under the title of 'The World Bewitched, or a Critical Investigation of the commonly-received Opinion respecting Spirits, their Nature, Power, and Acts, and all those extraordinary Feats which Men are said to perform through their Aid;' 1691. 'He founds his arguments on two grand principles—that from their very nature spirits cannot act upon material beings, and that the Scriptures represent the devil and his satellites as shut up in the prison of hell. To explain away the texts which militate against his system, evidently cost him much labour and perplexity. His interpretations, for the most part, are similar to those still relied on by the believers in his doctrine' (Note by Murdock in Mosheim's Institutes of Ecclesiastical History). The usually candid Mosheim notices, apparently with contempt, '"The World Bewitched," a prolix and copious work, in which he perverts and explains away, with no little ingenuity indeed, but with no less audacity, whatever the sacred volume relates of persons possessed by evil spirits, and of the power of demons, and maintains that the miserable being whom the sacred writers call Satan and the devil, together with his ministers, is bound with everlasting chains in hell, so that he cannot thence go forth to terrify mortals and to plot against the righteous.' Balthazar Becker, one of the most meritorious of the opponents of diabolism, was deposed from his ministerial office by an ecclesiastical synod, and denounced as an
