Further, our own attitude of mind toward witchcraft is a very modern attitude indeed. To us, one who asserts the existence, or even the possibility, of the crime of witchcraft staggers under a burden of proof which he cannot conceivably support. His thesis seems to us unreasonable, abnormal, monstrous; it can scarcely be stated in intelligible terms; it savors of madness. Now, before we can do any kind of justice to our forefathers,--a matter, be it remembered, of no moment to them, for they have gone to their reward, but, I take it, of considerable importance to us,--we must empty our heads of all such rationalistic ideas. To the contemporaries of William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall the existence of this crime was not merely an historical phenomenon, it was a fact of contemporary experience. Whoever denied the occurrence of witchcraft in the past, was an atheist; whoever refused to admit its actual possibility in the present, was either stubbornly incredulous, or destitute of the ability to draw an inference. Throughout the seventeenth century, very few persons could be found--not merely in New England, but in the whole world--who would have ventured to take so radical a position. That there had been witches and sorcerers in antiquity was beyond cavil. That there were, or might be, witches and sorcerers in the present was almost equally certain. The crime was recognized by the Bible, by all branches of the Church, by philosophy, by natural science, by the medical faculty, by the law of England. I do not offer these postulates as novelties. They are commonplaces. They will not be attacked by anybody who has even a slight acquaintance with the mass of testimony that might be adduced to establish them. It is a common practice to ascribe the tenets of the New Englanders in the matter of witchcraft to something peculiar about their religious opinions,--to what is loosely called their Puritan theology. This is a very serious error. The doctrines of our forefathers differed, in this regard, from the doctrines of the Roman and the Anglican Church in no essential,--one may safely add, in no particular. Lord Bacon was not a Puritan,--yet he has left his belief in sorcery recorded in a dozen places. James I. was not a Puritan,[3] but his Dæmonologie (1597) is a classic treatise, his zeal in prosecuting sorcerers is notorious, and his statute of 1603[4] was the act under which Matthew Hopkins, in the time of the Commonwealth, sent two hundred witches to the gallows in two years,--nearly ten times as many as perished in Massachusetts from the first settlement to the beginning of the eighteenth century.