At Leith, in 1664, nine
women were burned together. Condemnations and punishments of
women in batches were not uncommon. Torture was used far more
freely than in England, both in detecting witches and in
punishing them. The natural argument developed in hundreds of
pulpits was this: If the Allwise God punishes his creatures with
tortures infinite in cruelty and duration, why should not his
ministers, as far as they can, imitate him?
The strongest minds in both branches of the Protestant Church
in Great Britain devoted themselves to maintaining the
superstition. The newer scientific modes of thought, and
especially the new ideas regarding the heavens, revealed first
by Copernicus and Galileo and later by Newton, Huygens, and
Halley, were gradually dissipating the whole domain of the
Prince of the Power of the Air; but from first to last a long
line of eminent divines, Anglican and Calvinistic, strove to
resist the new thought. On the Anglican side, in the seventeenth
century, Meric Casaubon, Doctor of Divinity and a high dignitary
of Canterbury,--Henry More, in many respects the most eminent
scholar in the Church,--Cudworth, by far the most eminent
philosopher, and Dr.
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