turn” that poor old Brabantio could have done himself, had he been living to hear of his daughter’s cruel death.[4] It is next to impossible for people in the present day to have any idea what a consolation this belief in a good attendant spirit, specially appointed to guard weak mortals through life, to ward off evils, and guide to eternal safety, must have been in a time when, according to the current belief, any person, however blameless, however holy, was liable at any moment to be possessed by a devil, or harried and tortured by a witch.

[Footnote 1:  Act II. sc. i.]

[Footnote 2:  The Virgin Martyr, Act III. sc. iii.]

[Footnote 3:  Dr. Faustus, Act I. sc. iii.]

[Footnote 4:  Othello, Act V. sc. ii. 204.]

79.  This leads by a natural sequence to the consideration of another and more insidious form of attack upon mankind adopted by the evil spirits.  Possession and obsession were methods of assault adopted against the will of the afflicted person, and hardly to be avoided by him without the supernatural intervention of the Church.  The practice of witchcraft and magic involved the absolute and voluntary barter of body and soul to the Evil One, for the purpose of obtaining a few short years of superhuman power, to be employed for the gratification of the culprit’s avarice, ambition, or desire for revenge.

80.  In the strange history of that most inexplicable mental disease, the witchcraft epidemic, as it has been justly called by a high authority on such matters,[1] we moderns are, by the nature of our education and prejudices, completely incapacitated for sympathizing with either the persecutors or their victims.  We are at a loss to understand how clear-sighted and upright men, like Sir Matthew Hale, could consent to become parties to a relentless persecution to the death of poor helpless beings whose chief crime, in most cases, was, that they had suffered starvation both in body and in mind.  We cannot understand it, because none of us believe in the existence of evil spirits.  None; for although there are still a few persons who nominally hold to the ancient faith, as they do to many other respectable but effete traditions, yet they would be at a loss for a reason for the faith that is in them, should they chance to be asked for one; and not one of them would be prepared to make the smallest material sacrifice for the sake of it.  It is true that the existence of evil spirits recently received a tardy and somewhat hesitating recognition in our ecclesiastical courts,[2] which at first authoritatively declared that a denial of the existence of the personality of the devil constituted a man a notorious evil liver, and depraver of the Book of Common Prayer;[3] but this was promptly reversed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, under the auspices of two Low Church law lords and two archbishops, with the very vague proviso that “they do not mean to decide that those doctrines are otherwise than inconsistent