of the Fiscal General, and with the sanction of the Royal Council and the Holy Inquisition.  This work may be considered as establishing and defining the doctrines, in reference to witchcraft, prevailing in all Catholic countries.  It was indorsed by royal, judicial, academical, and ecclesiastical approval; is replete with extraordinary erudition, arranged in the most scientific form, embracing in a methodical classification all the minutest details of the subject, and codifying it into a complete system of law.  There was no particular in all the proceedings and all the doctrines brought out at the trials in Salem, which did not find ample justification and support in this work of Catholic, imperial, and European authority.

But perhaps the writer of the greatest influence on this subject in England and America, during the whole of the seventeenth century, was William Perkins, “the learned, pious, and painful preacher of God’s Word, at St. Andrew’s, in Cambridge,” where he died, in 1602, aged forty-four years.  He was quite a voluminous author; and many of his works were translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish.  Fuller, in “The Holy State,” selects him as the impersonation of the qualities requisite to “the Faithful Minister.”  In his glowing eulogium upon his learning and talents, he says:—­

“He would pronounce the word damne with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors’ ears a good while after.  And, when catechist of Christ’s College, in expounding the Commandments, applied them so home,—­able almost to make his hearers’ hearts fall down, and hairs to stand upright.  But, in his older age, he altered his voice, and remitted much of his former rigidness, often professing that to preach mercy was that proper office of the ministers of the gospel.”—­“Our Perkins brought the schools into the pulpit, and, unshelling their controversies out of their hard school-terms, made thereof plain and wholesome meat for his people; for he had a capacious head, with angles winding, and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies.”—­“He had a rare felicity in speedy reading of books; so that, as it were, riding post through an author, he took strict notice of all passages.  Perusing books so speedily, one would think he read nothing; so accurately, one would think he read all.”

An octavo volume, written by this great scholar and divine, was published at Cambridge in England, under the title, “Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft.”  It went through several editions, and had a wide and permanent circulation.

This work, the character of which is sufficiently indicated in its emphatic title, was the great authority on the subject with our fathers; and Mr. Parris had a copy of it in his possession when the proceedings in reference to witchcraft began at Salem Village.