[Footnote 1: Act II. sc. i.]
[Footnote 2: The Virgin Martyr, Act III. sc. iii.]
[Footnote 3: Dr. Faustus, Act I. sc. iii.]
[Footnote 4: Othello, Act V. sc. ii. 204.]
79. This leads by a natural sequence to the consideration of another and
more insidious form of attack upon mankind adopted by the evil spirits.
Possession and obsession were methods of assault adopted against the
will of the afflicted person, and hardly to be avoided by him without
the supernatural intervention of the Church. The practice of witchcraft
and magic involved the absolute and voluntary barter of body and soul to
the Evil One, for the purpose of obtaining a few short years of
superhuman power, to be employed for the gratification of the culprit's
avarice, ambition, or desire for revenge.
80. In the strange history of that most inexplicable mental disease, the
witchcraft epidemic, as it has been justly called by a high authority on
such matters,[1] we moderns are, by the nature of our education and
prejudices, completely incapacitated for sympathizing with either the
persecutors or their victims. We are at a loss to understand how
clear-sighted and upright men, like Sir Matthew Hale, could consent to
become parties to a relentless persecution to the death of poor helpless
beings whose chief crime, in most cases, was, that they had suffered
starvation both in body and in mind.
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