Joseph Glanvil, the most cogent of all
writers in favour of witchcraft, supported the orthodox
superstition in treatises of great power; and Sir Matthew Hale,
the greatest jurist of the period, condemning two women to be
burned for witchcraft, declared that he based his judgment on
the direct testimony of Holy Scripture. On the Calvinistic side
were the great names of Richard Baxter, who applauded some of
the worst cruelties in England, and of Increase and Cotton
Mather, who stimulated the worst in America; and these marshalled
in behalf of this cruel superstition a long line of eminent
divines, the most earnest of all, perhaps, being John Wesley.
Nor was the Lutheran Church in Sweden and the other Scandinavian
countries behind its sister churches, either in persecuting
witchcraft or in repressing doubts regarding the doctrine which
supported it.
But in spite of all these great authorities in every land, in
spite of such summary punishments as those of Flade, Loos, and
Bekker, and in spite of the virtual exclusion from church
preferment of all who doubted the old doctrine, the new
scientific view of the heavens was developed more and more; the
physical sciences were more and more cultivated; the new
scientific atmosphere in general more and more prevailed; and at
the end of the seventeenth century this vast growth of
superstition began to wither and droop.
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