In his reign, by Act of Parliament, witchcraft had been made punishable by death,[53] and the scandalous case of Lady Essex’s divorce had been decided on grounds of “maleficium versus hanc.”[54] Still more recently, as the wise and godly Baxter relates, during the period of the Commonwealth, the learned Calamy had looked on with approval, while Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder, tortured some poor wretches, among whom was one unfortunate dispossessed clergyman of the persecuted Church of England, into confessing revolting absurdities.[55] Still later, after the Restoration, the usually judicious Sir Matthew Hale had condemned and burned two women as witches, in the very Suffolk from which so many of the New Englanders had come, on evidence of the same character as that upon which American courts had to decide.[56] If these erred in believing in witchcraft, they erred in good company, with all the most orthodox teachers of religion and philosophy in Europe, Protestant and Catholic as well. Even Selden, who had no belief in witchcraft himself, justified the severity which was exercised against those condemned of that offence, by arguing that if a man thought that by turning his hat around and saying “Buz” he could kill a man, he ought to be put to death if he made the attempt, no matter how absurd the claim might be. Sir Thomas Browne, the well-known author of the _Religio Medici_, gave his testimony as an expert at the trial of the Suffolk witches, upon the side of the reality of witchcraft.[57] When the student of the early annals of the Colonies realizes the extent of this superstition, and at the same time the literal character of the religion of the majority of the settlers in New England, their bitter hatred of theological opponents, and their readiness to believe evil in regard to them; when he appreciates how harsh and mean and unlovely was the life that most of them lived, and observes that, side by side with an exalted religious enthusiasm, the lowest and most abhorrent forms of indecency and vice prevailed, he will no longer be inclined to wonder at the existence in such a community of the witchcraft delusion, but will rather be amazed that, with such a people and among such surroundings, its duration was so short and its victims so few.