written Feb. 19, 1720, the excellent Dr. Watts, after having expressed his doubts respecting the sufficiency of the spectral evidence for condemnation, says, in reference to the Salem witchcraft, “I am much persuaded that there was much immediate agency of the Devil in these affairs, and perhaps there were some real witches too.”  Not far from this time, we find what was probably the opinion of the most liberal-minded and cultivated people in England expressed in the following language of Addison:  “To speak my thoughts freely, I believe, in general, that there is and has been such a thing as witchcraft, but, at the same time, can give no credit to any particular instance of it.”

There was an execution for witchcraft in Scotland in 1722.  As late as the middle of the last century, an annual discourse, commemorative of executions that took place in Huntingdon during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, continued to be delivered in that place.  An act of a Presbyterian synod in Scotland, published in 1743, and reprinted at Glasgow in 1766, denounced as a national sin the repeal of the penal laws against witchcraft.

Blackstone, the great oracle of British law, and who flourished in the latter half of the last century, declared his belief in witchcraft in the following strong terms:  “To deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence, of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God, in various passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of commerce with evil spirits.”

It is related, in White’s “Natural History of Selborne,” that, in the year 1751, the people of Tring, a market town of Hertfordshire, and scarcely more than thirty miles from London, “seized on two superannuated wretches, crazed with age and overwhelmed with infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft.”  They were carried to the edge of a horse-pond, and there subjected to the water ordeal.  The trial resulted in the acquittal of the prisoners; but they were both drowned in the process.

A systematic effort seems to have been made during the eighteenth century to strengthen and renew the power of superstition.  Alarmed by the progress of infidelity, many eminent and excellent men availed themselves of the facilities which their position at the head of the prevailing literature afforded them, to push the faith of the people as far as possible towards the opposite extreme of credulity.  It was a most unwise, and, in its effects, deplorable policy.  It was a betrayal of the cause of true religion.  It was an acknowledgment that it could not be vindicated before the tribunal of severe reason.  Besides all the misery produced by filling the imagination with unreal objects of terror, the restoration to influence, during the last century, of the fables