As to the mode of delivering sermons, some Nonconformists, as well as Churchmen, read from a MS., and Dr. Charnock is described as having used an eye-glass to assist his sight.[313] Of Baxter, it is said in the funeral sermon by his friend and assistant Sylvester--“He was a person wonderful at extemporate preaching, for _having once left his notes behind him_, he was surprised into extemporate thoughts upon (as I remember) Heb. iv. 15, ‘For we have not an High Priest, &c.’ Whereon he preached to very great satisfaction unto all that heard him; and when he came down from the pulpit, he asked me if I was not tired? I said, With what? He said, With his extemporate discourse. I told him, that had he not declared it, I believe none could have discovered it. His reply to me was, that he thought it very needful for a minister to have a body of divinity in his head.” Clarkson, in his funeral sermon for Dr. Owen, remarks that he seldom used notes. Of Dr. Bates, Howe observes, that faithful to the example and traditions of their Puritan fathers, “his sermons, wherein nothing could be more remote from ramble, he constantly delivered from his memory, and hath sometime told me, with an amicable freedom, that he partly did it, to teach some that were younger to preach without notes.”[314] Bull, however,--in this respect anticipating Addison,--advised young Divines not at first to preach their own sermons, but to provide themselves with the compositions of approved authors, or to read to their congregations either one of the authorized Homilies or a chapter selected from _The Whole Duty of Man_.[315] The old Puritan practice of taking down sermons continued to be very common; and, if we may notice so trivial a matter as pulpit costume, it is amusing to add an odd story told of a Royal chaplain, who preached before the King at Newmarket, “in a long periwig and holland sleeves, according to the then fashion for gentlemen,” at which His Majesty was so scandalized that he commanded the Chancellor of the University to put in execution the statutes respecting decency in apparel.[316] [Sidenote: SUPERSTITION.] VIII. Superstition still prevailed. Though the zeal for witchfinding diminished, rumours of witchcraft continued in circulation. People in Worcestershire said, that if certain witches had not been taken up, the King would never have returned to England. From Lancashire, a stronghold of the infernal sisterhood, one of the correspondents of the Secretary of State wrote an account of a woman who confessed, that she, and her father and her mother, “each rode on a black cat to Warrington, nine miles off, and that the cats sucked her mother till they sucked blood.” He states, however, that he had “little faith in this, though given on oath.”[317]