these many years of opinion there never was any." [444] Yet in his later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter [445] to the activities of Satan in instilling the belief that "there is no God at all ... that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours...; that the natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man, and the Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature." He further notes as coming from the same source "a secondary and deductive Atheism--that although men concede there is a God, yet should they deny his providence. And therefore assertions have flown about, that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existences therein." [446] Browne now asserts merely that "many there are who cannot conceive that there was ever any absolute Atheist," and does not clearly affirm that Satan labours wholly in vain. The broad fact remains that he avows "reason is a rebel unto faith"; and in the Vulgar Errors he shows in his own reasoning much of the practical play of the new skepticism. [447] Yet it is finally on record that in 1664, on the trial of two women for witchcraft, Browne declared that the fits suffered from by the children said to have been bewitched "were natural, but heightened by the devil's co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies." [448] This amazing deliverance is believed to have "turned the scale" in the minds of the jury against the poor women, and they were sentenced by the sitting judge, Sir Matthew Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that in Browne's latter years the irrational element in him, never long dormant, overpowered the rational. The judgment is a sad one to have to pass on one of the greatest masters of prose in any language. In other men, happily, the progression was different. The opening even of Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, so far as it goes, falls little short of the deistic position. [449] A new vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against supernaturalism. Spencer's great work, De legibus Hebræorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars. [450] And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.