Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/157

Rh projects made use of the witch-delusion. One of the most striking cases is that of Erich II of Braunschweig-Kalenberg, who, being heavily indebted, turned Catholic, in 1572, in order to enter the Spanish service. He accused his wife and four of her ladies of bewitching him to punish him for his apostasy; his wife ran away to her family home, but the ladies were repeatedly tortured to the extremest limit. As they knew nothing and could say nothing, they were held to have proved their innocence.

No argument ever made any way against this delusion. Lecky thinks that "its decline presented a spectacle, not of argument or conflict, but of silent evanescence and decay." The credit of putting an end to it belonged to a series of great skeptics and free thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire, who killed it with scorn and contempt. In England this view of it got strong help from the skeptical reaction against Puritanism, after the restoration of the Stuarts. The great men led the intelligent classes to this view, and they led the masses to understand that that was the proper view, just as now all intelligent people treat spiritualism. The Evangelical and Puritan parties kept up the faith in witchcraft: Richard Baxter wrote against witchcraft, but John Wesley reaffirmed the faith in it ; King James I presided at the torture of Doctor Fian (John Cunningham) for causing a storm which hindered the king from returning from Denmark. The victim never confessed, but was burned, Agnes Sampson is otherwise said to have done the harm; she, it appears, went to sea in a sieve. In 1720 F. Hutchinson's Witchcraft was published, in which the author tries to explain the texts of the Bible about witches, and interprets the witches as impostors; he tells a story of an Anglican