ingredients for a witches' ointment;[2]--Raleigh, adopting miserable
fallacies at second hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of
his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]--Selden, maintaining that
crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]--The detector
of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the
casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew
Hale;[6]--Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here
paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch
it;[7]--The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels
of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores of
antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer
and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;[8]--The
gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution,
and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to
assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]--and
the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his
searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound,
with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford, and devils
at Mascon.[10] Nor is it from a retrospect of our own intellectual
progress only that we find how capricious, how intermitting, and how
little privileged to great names or high intellects, or even to those
minds which seemed to possess the very qualifications which would
operate as conductors, are those illuminating gleams of common sense
which shoot athwart the gloom, and aid a nation on its tardy progress
to wisdom, humanity, and justice. If on the Continent there were, in
the sixteenth century, two men from whom an exposure of the
absurdities of the system of witchcraft might have been naturally and
rationally expected, and who seem to stand out prominently from the
crowd as predestined to that honourable and salutary office, those two
men were John Bodin[11] and Thomas Erastus.[12] The former a