The belief in witchcraft, although so common in Puritan times, and even culminating in England under the Commonwealth,[419] was not, as already indicated, of Puritan origin; nor was it confined to Puritan religionists. Richard Baxter, indeed, dwelt much upon the subject, and derived from it arguments against the doctrines of materialism and the denial of revelation; but men of another theological school, such as More and Cudworth, were equally believers in this form of the marvellous; and the same faith was held by the scientific Robert Boyle, and by Sir Thomas Brown, notwithstanding his exposure of "Vulgar Errors." Nor did this credulity, after all, produce in England an amount of mischief and suffering, great as it was, to be compared with what it did on the Continent before the Reformation, when as many as 500 people are said to have been executed at Geneva in one year, and the Inquisitor Remigius boasted that he had put 900 to death in the province of Lorraine.[420] Neither were there wanting in this country some who, when the rage for witch-burning was most rampant, protested against the whole system as an impious absurdity. In a curious tract, written by Thomas Adey, in the year 1656, entitled, "A Candle in the Dark; or, a Treatise concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft," we meet with the following passage:--"It is reported by travellers that some people in America do worship for a day the first living creature they see in the morning, be it but a bird or a worm. This idolatry is like the idolatry of this part of the world, who, when they are afflicted in body or goods by God's hand, they have an eye to some mouse, or bug, or frog, or other living creature, saying it is some witch's imp that is sent to afflict them; ascribing the work of God to a witch, or any mean creature, rather than God." The writer also alludes to Reginald Scott, who had published a book, called "The Discovery of Witchcraft," in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and describes it as composed for the instruction of all Judges and Justices of that day; which book, he observes, did for a while make great impression on the magistracy, and also on the clergy, "but, since that time, England has shamefully fallen from the truth which they began to receive." [Sidenote: _Clerical Costume._]