hostile criticism, we cannot doubt that he would have spoken out in condemnation. His complete silence on the subject is therefore the most emphatic testimony to the general approval of Hale’s proceedings. Highly significant, too, is the fact that even Lord Campbell does not blame Hale for believing in witchcraft, but only for allowing weight to the evidence in this particular case. “I would very readily have pardoned him,” he writes, “for an undoubting belief in witchcraft, and I should have considered that this belief detracted little from his character for discernment and humanity. The Holy Scriptures teach us that, in some ages of the world, wicked persons, by the agency of evil spirits, were permitted, through means which exceed the ordinary powers of nature, to work mischief to their fellow-creatures.... In the reign of Charles II., a judge who from the bench should have expressed a disbelief in [magic and the black art] would have been thought to show little respect for human laws, and to be nothing better than an atheist.” We may profitably compare what Guilford himself (then Francis North, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) wrote of the Devonshire witches in 1682,--nearly twenty years after the Bury case:--“We cannot reprieve them, without appearing to deny the very being of witches, which, as it is contrary to law, so I think it would be ill for his Majesty’s service, for it may give the faction occasion to set afoot the old trade of witch-finding, that may cost many innocent persons their lives which the justice will prevent.”[20] Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the Religio Medici, was no Puritan, and he was one of the leading scientific men of his day. Yet he gave his opinion, as an expert, at the request of the Court in this same Bury St. Edmunds case, to the following effect:--“That the Devil in such cases did work upon the Bodies of Men and Women, upon a Natural Foundation, (that is) to stir up, and excite such humours super-abounding in their Bodies to a great excess,”[21] and further, that “he conceived, that these swouning Fits were Natural, and nothing else but what they call the Mother,[22] but only heightned to a great excess by the subtilty of the Devil, co-operating with the Malice of these which we term Witches, at whose Instance he doth these Villanies.”[23] Browne has been much blamed for this dictum, but there is nothing unreasonable or unscientific in it, if one merely grants the actuality of demoniacal possession, which was then to all intents and purposes an article of faith. If the devil can work upon our bodies at all, of course he can intensify any natural fits or spasms from which we happen to be suffering. Thus Browne’s diagnosis of the disease in this case as hysteria, by no means excluded the hypothesis of _maleficium_. But most modern writers refuse to discuss such subjects except _de haut en bas_,--from the vantage-ground of modern science.