Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/799

Rh Third. That the clergy inculcated the idea that woman was in league with the devil, and that strong intellect, remarkable beauty, or unusual sickness, were in themselves a proof of that league.

Catholic and Protestant countries alike agreed in holding woman as the chief accessory of the devil. Luther said, "I would have no compassion for a witch; I would burn them all." As late as 1768, John Wesley declared the giving up of witchcraft to be in effect giving up the Bible. James I., on his accession to the throne, ordered the learned work of Reginald Scot against witchcraft, to be burned in compliance with the act of Parliament of 1603, which ratified a belief in witchcraft over the three kingdoms. Under Henry VIII., from whose reign the Protestant Reformation in England dates, an act of Parliament made witchcraft felony; this act was again confirmed under Elizabeth. To doubt witchcraft was as heretical under Protestantism as under Catholicism.

Even the widely extolled Pilgrim Fathers brought this belief with them when they stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock. With the "Ducking-Stool" and the "Scarlet Letter" of shame for woman, while her companion in sin went free, they also brought with them a belief in witches. Richard Baxter, the "greatest of the Puritans," condemned those who disbelieved in witchcraft as "wicked Sadducees," his work against it adding intensity to the persecution. Cotton Mather was active in fomenting a belief in this doctrine.

So convinced were those in power of the tendency of woman to diabolism that the learned Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women without even summing up the evidence. Old women, for no other reason than that they were old, were held as most susceptible to the assaults of the devil, and most especially endowed with supernatural powers for evil, to doubt which was equivalent to doubting the Bible. We see a reason for this hatred of old women, in the fact that woman was chiefly viewed from a sensual stand-point, and when by reason of age or debility, she no longer attracted the physical admiration of man, he looked upon her as of no farther use to the world, and as possessing no right to life. At one period it was very unusual for an old woman in the north of Europe to die peaceably in her bed. The persecution against them raged with special virulence in Scotland, where upon the act of the British Parliament in 17—, abolishing the burning and hanging of witches, the assembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland "confessed" this act of Parliament "as a great national sin." Looked upon as a sin rather than a crime, the Church sought its control, and when coming under its power, witchcraft was punished with much greater severity than