The displaying of supposed witchcraft : $b Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth Webster, John
Religion
The displaying of supposed witchcraft : $b Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth
Webster, John
Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- Early works to 1800
2. There are another generation that seem wise in their own eyes, whose
brains are like blown Bladders filled with the wind of over-weening and
self-conceitedness, and these usually do huff, snuff, and puff at every
thing that agrees not with their Capricious Cockscombs, when their
abilities for the most part lie in the scraps they have gathered from
the Theaters, or from the discourses had in Taverns and Coffee-houses,
and if they can but reach some pittiful pieces of Drollery and Raillery,
they think themselves fit and able to censure any thing though never
read nor seen, except the Title Page. To these I have little to say, as
being but such airy and frothy Vaporoso’s, as the least blast of sound
reason maketh them vanish into smoak and nothing; but only with them to
take into serious consideration, the saying of the Wiseman: _Seest thou
a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a Fool than of
him_. And the counsel of a learned Father is proper for such vain
confidents: _Expedit benè timere, quam malè fidere; & utilius est, ut
infirmum se homo cognoscat, ut fortis existat, quàm fortis videri velit,
& infirmus emergat_.
3. There are another sort that are so critically envious, that they can
allow of nothing that is not their own production, and beareth not the
test of their approbation, and cannot but stigmatize the labours of
others how good or beneficial soever they be, because they shadow their
fame, and tend not to the advancement of their own reputation: even as
divers sorts of insects do feed upon the excrements of other animals, so
these feed their own humours, and please their own fancies by the
calumniating, and blacking the labours of others. These being guilty of
peevish morosity cannot look kindly at any thing of anothers, without
frowning, distast, and censuring; but we have little to say unto such as
these, but shall leave them to the gall of their own breasts, and the
spleen of their own minds, having neither intended our labours for any
such, nor valuing their censures how sharp and bitter soever they be.
For _nulla fœlicitas tam magna est, ut malignitatis dentes vitare
possit_. And therefore it is discretion to bear that patiently for which
humane prudence can find no remedy.
[Sidenote: 1 Cor. 13. 11.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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