pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”  Similar denunciations occur in the nineteenth and twentieth chapters of Leviticus.  In like manner, it is a charge against Manasses (2 Chronicles xxxviii.) that he caused his children to pass through the fire, observed times, used enchantments and witchcraft, and dealt with familiar spirits and with wizards.  These passages seem to concur with the former, in classing witchcraft among other desertions of the prophets of the Deity, in order to obtain responses by the superstitious practices of the pagan nations around them.  To understand the texts otherwise seems to confound the modern system of witchcraft, with all its unnatural and improbable outrages on common sense, with the crime of the person who, in classical days, consulted the oracle of Apollo—­a capital offence in a Jew, but surely a venial sin in an ignorant and deluded pagan.

To illustrate the nature of the Hebrew witch and her prohibited criminal traffic, those who have written on this subject have naturally dwelt upon the interview between Saul and the Witch of Endor, the only detailed and particular account of such a transaction which is to be found in the Bible; a fact, by the way, which proves that the crime of witchcraft (capitally punished as it was when discovered) was not frequent among the chosen people, who enjoyed such peculiar manifestations of the Almighty’s presence.  The Scriptures seem only to have conveyed to us the general fact (being what is chiefly edifying) of the interview between the witch and the King of Israel.  They inform us that Saul, disheartened and discouraged by the general defection of his subjects, and the consciousness of his own unworthy and ungrateful disobedience, despairing of obtaining an answer from the offended Deity, who had previously communicated with him through his prophets, at length resolved, in his desperation, to go to a divining woman, by which course he involved himself in the crime of the person whom he thus consulted, against whom the law denounced death—­a sentence which had been often executed by Saul himself on similar offenders.  Scripture proceeds to give us the general information that the king directed the witch to call up the Spirit of Samuel, and that the female exclaimed that gods had arisen out of the earth—­that Saul, more particularly requiring a description of the apparition (whom, consequently, he did not himself see), she described it as the figure of an old man with a mantle.  In this figure the king acknowledges the resemblance of Samuel, and sinking on his face, hears from the apparition, speaking in the character of the prophet, the melancholy prediction of his own defeat and death.