Four dissenters from the current witchcraft dogma we must pass over in silence--John Wagstaffe, Sir Robert Filmer, Robert Calef, and Dr. Francis Hutchinson. Calef came too late to be really significant in our discussion; Filmer’s tract is a kind of _jeu d’esprit_, not likely to have had any influence except upon lawyers;[88] and Wagstaffe’s book is a quite inconsiderable affair. Yet, in parting, we must not neglect an odd remark concerning two out of the four--as well as one other, John Webster, whose lucubrations we have already criticised--a remark which, occurring as it does in a work of much learning and unusual distinction, illustrates in striking fashion the inaccuracy which we have already had occasion to notice, now and again, in recent writers who have busied themselves with the abstruse and complicated subject of witchcraft. President White, in his Warfare of Science with Theology, expresses his admiration for Webster, Wagstaffe, and Hutchinson in the following terms:--“But especially should honour be paid to the younger men in the Church, who wrote at length against the whole system: such men as Wagstaffe and Webster and Hutchinson, who in the humbler ranks of the clergy stood manfully for truth, with the certainty that by so doing they were making their own promotion impossible.”[89] Of the three men whom Dr. White thus commends for renouncing all hope of ecclesiastical preferment, the first, John Webster, was sixty-seven years old when he published his book; he had long been a Non-Conformist, and he describes himself on his title-page as “Practitioner in Physick.” The second, John Wagstaffe, was a gentleman of independent means who damaged his health by “continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors”[90] and who was not in orders at all; the third. Dr. Francis Hutchinson, was Chaplain in Ordinary to King George I. when he published his Essay and was advanced to a bishopric two years after the first edition of the book appeared.[91]