‘Sir Thomas Brown of Norwich, the famous physician of his time, was desired by my Lord Chief Baron [Hale] to give his judgement [in a case of witchcraft]. And he declared that he was clearly of opinion That the Fits were natural, but heightened by the devil co-operating with the malice of the witches at whose instance he did the villanies. And he added, That in Denmark there had been lately a great Discovery of Witches, who used the very same way of afflicting persons by conveying pins into them.’ The jury ‘having Sir Thomas Brown’s Declaration about Denmark for their encouragement, in half an hour brought them in guilty.... They were hanged maintaining their innocence.’[341] Had Brown been better acquainted with _The Deceptions of Demons_ he might have hesitated to make that ‘Declaration about Denmark’, but Weyer’s early opponent, Bishop Binsfeld, has no difficulties. Quoting Origen (in Matt. xvii. 15) he exclaims, ‘Physicians may say what they like, we who believe the Gospel hold that devils cause lunacy’ and many other diseases.[342] But for a demon to cause disease or do other harm, two things are requisite, the permission of God and the free will of some malicious person, witch, or sorcerer. The physician, Weyer, has denied the possibility of a compact with the devil, but is easily refuted by Scripture and Church authority. Did not the devil try to make a compact with Christ Himself?[343] Similarly he has no difficulty in showing that the Hebrew word for witch means much more than ‘poisoner’, and, given the almost universal beliefs of the age, it must be admitted that Brown and the bishop have the best of the argument. In the opening chapter of his well-known work on rationalism, Lecky says that the decline of the belief in witchcraft ‘presents a spectacle not of argument and conflict, but of silent evanescence and decay’; it was ‘unargumentative and insensible’. Scot’s work ‘exercised no appreciable influence’, and, so far as the result was concerned, he, Weyer, and their like might as well have kept quiet and waited for the change to be effected by ‘what is called the spirit of the age’, that is, ‘a gradual insensible yet profound modification of the habits of thought’ due to ‘the progress of civilization’. This theory has been ably criticized elsewhere.[344] The truth it contains seems to be that argument would not have sufficed to change public opinion about witchcraft, without the aid of changes in other matters, and especially the development and success of scientific investigation. Such discoveries as the motion of the earth and circulation of the blood, when generally accepted (which was not till late in the seventeenth century), showed that the learned as well as the vulgar might be utterly mistaken in important beliefs supported by apparently good evidence, and that scientific methods of attaining truth differed widely from those of the witch-hunters.