state of mind which accompanied the Civil War, was a furious persecution of ‘witches’.  In a rare little book, Select Cases of Conscience, touching Witches and Witchcraft, by John Gaule, ’preacher of the Word at Great Staughton in the county of Huntington’ (London, 1646), we find the author not denying the existence of witchcraft, but pleading for calm, learned and judicial investigation.  To do this was to take his life in his hand, for Matthew Hopkins, a fanatical miscreant, was ruling in a Reign of Terror through the country.  The clergy of the Church of England, as Hutchinson proves in his Treatise of Witchcraft (second edition, London, 1720), had been comparatively cautious in their treatment of the subject.  Their record is far from clean, but they had exposed some impostures, chiefly, it is fair to say, where Nonconformists, or Catholics, had detected the witch.  With the Restoration the general laxity went so far as to scoff at witchcraft, to deny its existence, and even, in the works of Wagstaff and Webster, to minimise the leading case of the Witch of Endor.  Against the ‘drollery of Sadducism,’ the Psychical Researchers within the English Church, like Glanvill and Henry More, or beyond its pale, like Richard Baxter and many Scotch divines, defended witchcraft and apparitions as outworks of faith in general.  The modern Psychical Society, whatever the predisposition of some of its members may be, explores abnormal phenomena, not in the interests of faith, but of knowledge.  Again, the old inquirers were dominated by a belief in the devil.  They saw witchcraft and demoniacal possession, where the moderns see hysterics and hypnotic conditions.

For us the topic is rather akin to mythology, and ‘folk-psychology,’ as the Germans call it.  We are interested, as will be shown, in a most curious question of evidence, and the value of evidence.  It will again appear that the phenomena reported by Glanvill, More, Sinclair, Kirk, Telfair, Bovet, are identical with those examined by Messrs. Gurney, Myers, Kellar (the American professional conjurer), and many others.  The differences, though interesting, are rather temporary and accidental than essential.

A few moments of attention to the table talk of the party assembled at Ragley will enable us to understand the aims, the methods, and the ideas of the old informal society.  By a lucky accident, fragments of the conversation may be collected from Glanvill’s Sadducismus Triumphatus, {88a} and from the correspondence of Glanvill, Henry More, and Robert Boyle.  Mr. Boyle, among more tangible researches, devoted himself to collecting anecdotes, about the second sight.  These manuscripts are not published in the six huge quarto volumes of Boyle’s works; on the other hand, we possess Lord Tarbet’s answer to his questions. {88b} Boyle, as his letters show, was a rather chary believer in witchcraft and possession.  He referred Glanvill to his kinsman, Lord Orrery, who had enjoyed an experience not very familiar; he had seen a gentleman’s butler float in the air!