. THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
basis is laid for.it in the Thomistic theology, which is practically the officially recognized and normative system of the Roman Catholic Church.
(O. Z6cKLER.)
II. In Great Britain and the American Colonies: The belief in witchcraft was one of the earliest delusions entertained by man under the primitive dualism which events in the sphere of nature made
to appear so much a matter of course
1. Legal (see CompaRAtIvVE Retraction, VI., 1,
Provisions a, §§ 4-5). That legislation under the against earlier civilizations should take cog- Witchcraft. nizance of it was equally a matter of course. Thus Hammurabi (see Ham- MURABI AND His Cops, II., § 2; ef. DB, extra vol., p. 599) began his codified legislation with two sections dealing with the subject, and the Brahman and Zoroastrian legislation has much to say on it. Under Christianity the basis of the synodical, papal, and scholastic pronouncements described in the preceding discussion was found in the Mosaic and prophetic denunciations (e.g., Ex. xxii. 18; Deut. xviii. 10-11; Micah v. 12). The Biblical interdiction together with the remnants of heathen superstition aided in perpetuating the belief; and this accounts for the fact that the educated, especially the clergy, were so prominent in the actual outbreaks which occurred like epidemics. In Western Europe the seventeenth century may be described as the era of the witchcraft delusions, exemplified by the execution of seventy persons in Sweden in 1670, while 1,000 are reported to have been executed in a single province in Italy in one year. This epidemic period was anticipated by sporadic prosecutions of witches in the previous century. In England, Scotland, and the North American colonies the actual prosecutions were based on legal provisions which were provided from time to time, beginning in the sixteenth century. In England witchcraft, defined as a compact made by man or woman with Satan, was made a felony in 1541 under King Henry VIII. (83 Henry VIII., chap. 8), and this act was extended under Elizabeth in 1562. The volume of James I. referred to above was partly the occasion of the new act of parliament in the first year of his reign (1603; 1 James I., chap. 12) exactly defining the crime. A well-known legal authority (M. Dalton, The Countrey Justice, London, 1618, latest ed., 1746) had a chapter on witchcraft aiming to define exactly the marks on the body of a witch. In Scotland the first act on the subject was dated 1563, amended 1649, under which the clergy were often the instruments of justice and presbyteries frequently the petitioners for the same. The repeal of the laws in England and Scotland in 1735 evoked many and persistent protests from high and low. Massachusetts in 1641 made witchcraft a capital offense; Connecticut followed in December, 1642; and in 1655 New Haven Colony based a similar law explicitly upon Ex. xxii. 18; Lev. xx. 27; and Deut. xviii. 10-11.
One of the noteworthy features of the witchcraft prosecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, due in part to the Biblical basis, is the eminence of those in Church, State, science, and society who supported by voice and act the idea itself and the civil procedure against witches. Thus
Cranmer, in 1549 (Articles of Visitation), enjoined the clergy to make inquiries concerning the practise of witchcraft. Bishop Jewel in a ser-
2. Classes mon before Queen Elizabeth in 1558
Affected lamented the multiplication of witches.
by Richard Baxter’s Certainty of the the Belief. Worlds of Spirits (London, 1691) places him on record to the same effect. Cotton Mather in New England, who served on a commission to advise the special court which tried the cases and suggested caution in accepting certain lines of evidence offered (though on grounds which emphasize the extravagance of the superstition), approved after six executions at Salem the evidence and the convictions which resulted so fatally (Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, Boston, 1693). The offense was understood as cognizable in courts of justice by great English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Sir Matthew Hale, while Lord Bacon and Sir Henry More gave utterance to their belief in the reality of compacts made between human beings and Satan. William Penn is reported to have sat as justice at the trial of two Swedish women accused of witchcraft, and they escaped only through a technicality in the proceedings. Physicians diagnosed cases as due to witchcraft. The pronouncement of Dr. Griggs, the Salem village physician in the case of the “ afflicted ” children of that place, is responsible in large part for the prosecutions which made it notorious, in which, between Mar. and Sept., 1692, nineteen were hanged and one was pressed to death. While among the people the opinions of the educated were reflected with a thousand weird and fantastic enlargements.
Under the Scotch statutes in Aberdeen in 1597 twenty-four persons were burned at the stake for this offense. At Prestonpans (?) Isobel Grierson
met the same fate in 1607, a part of
3- Prose- the evidence being that she had ap-
cutions in peared in the form of a cat to work
Great _ her evil deeds. In 1617 twenty-seven Britain. persons were executed in Aberdeen or the vicinity; in 1622 Margaret Wallace suffered death, her accuser being the minister at Garmunnock; and an intimate of hers, Alexander Hunter or Hatteraic, shortly after suffered death; Alice Nisbet was executed at Hilton in 1632. In the same vicinity the year 1643 saw several executions, some of them by mobs, one by the awful penalty of pressing to death. Ninety women are reported to have been hanged in Scotland in 1645, and 120 in 1661. Possibly the last execution for this cause in that country was that of Little Dean at Dornoch in 1722. In England the authority of King James I. gave increased currency to the belief in witches. In 1645-47 the infamous witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, ran his horrible course, and in that time in Suffolk and Essex 200 witches were tried and most of them executed (J. Howell, Familiar Letters, 1645, 10th ed., Aberdeen, 1753). In 1664 two women were tried in Suffolk before Sir Matthew Hale, who then affirmed the certainty of the fact of witchcraft.
When in the mother country there was manifested among all classes so lively a sense of the supposedly supernatural, reenforced by official prose-
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