The superstition of witchcraft stretches back into remote antiquity, and has many roots. In Europe it is partly of Druidical origin. The Druidesses were part priestesses, part shrewd old ladies, who dealt in magic and medicine. They were called _allrune_, all-knowing. There was some touch of classical superstition mingled in the stream which was flowing down to us; so an edict of a Council of Trêves, in the year 1310, has this injunction:—“Nulla mulierum se nocturnis horis equitare cum Dianâ profiteatur; hæc enim dæmoniaca est illusio.” But the main source from which we derived this superstition is the East, and traditions and facts incorporated in our religion. There were only wanted the ferment of thought of the fifteenth century, the energy, ignorance, enthusiasm, and faith of those days, and the papal denunciation of witchcraft by the Bull of Innocent the Eighth, in 1459, to give fury to the delusion. And from this time, for three centuries, the flames at which more than a hundred thousand victims perished cast a lurid light over Europe. But the fires are out—the superstition is extinct—and its history is trite, and has lost all interest; so I will hasten to the one point in it which deserves, which indeed requires, explanation. I do not advert to the late duration of the belief in witchcraft—so late, that it is but a century this very month of January since the last witch, a lady and a sub-prioress, whose confession I will afterwards give, was executed in Germany; while, at the same period, a strong effort was made in Scotland, by good and conscientious, and otherwise sensible persons, to reanimate the embers of the delusion, as is shown by the following evidence. In February, 1743, the Associate Presbytery, meaning the Presbytery of the Secession or Seceders, (from the Scottish Established Church,) passed, and soon thereafter published, an act for renewing the National Covenant, in which there is a solemn acknowledgment of sins, and vow to renounce them; among which sins is specified “the repeal of the penal statutes against witchcraft, contrary to the express laws of God, and for which a holy God may be provoked, in a way of righteous judgment, to leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and more, and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce others to the same wicked and dangerous snare.”—(Note, _Edinburgh Review_, January, 1847.)