his father’s chimney, and some such goodly matter.  But it ended in near a score of persons being committed to prison; and the consequence was that young Robinson was carried from church to church in the neighbourhood, that he might recognise the faces of any persons he had seen at the rendezvous of witches.  Old Robinson, who had been an evidence against the former witches in 1613, went along with his son, and knew, doubtless, how to make his journey profitable; and his son probably took care to recognise none who might make a handsome consideration.  “This boy,” says Webster, “was brought into the church at Kildwick, a parish church, where I, being then curate there, was preaching at the time, to look about him, which made some little disturbance for the time.”  After prayers Mr. Webster sought and found the boy, and two very unlikely persons, who, says he, “did conduct him and manage the business:  I did desire some discourse with the boy in private, but that they utterly denied.  In the presence of a great many many people I took the boy near me and said, ’Good boy, tell me truly and in earnest, didst thou hear and see such strange things of the motions of the witches as many do report that thou didst relate, or did not some person teach thee to say such things of thyself?’ But the two men did pluck the boy from me, and said he had been examined by two able justices of peace, and they never asked him such a question.  To whom I replied, ’The persons accused had the more wrong.’” The boy afterwards acknowledged, in his more advanced years, that he was instructed and suborned to swear these things against the accused persons by his father and others, and was heard often to confess that on the day which he pretended to see the said witches at the house or barn, he was gathering plums in a neighbour’s orchard.[56]

[Footnote 56:  Webster on Witchcraft, edition 1677, p. 278.]

There was now approaching a time when the law against witchcraft, sufficiently bloody in itself, was to be pushed to more violent extremities than the quiet scepticism of the Church of England clergy gave way to.  The great Civil War had been preceded and anticipated by the fierce disputes of the ecclesiastical parties.  The rash and ill-judged attempt to enforce upon the Scottish a compliance with the government and ceremonies of the High Church divines, and the severe prosecutions in the Star Chamber and Prerogative Courts, had given the Presbyterian system for a season a great degree of popularity in England; and as the King’s party declined during the Civil War, and the state of church-government was altered, the influence of the Calvinistic divines increased.  With much strict morality and pure practice of religion, it is to be regretted these were still marked by unhesitating belief in the existence of sorcery, and a keen desire to extend and enforce the legal penalties against it.  Wier has considered the clergy of every sect as being too eager in this species of persecution: