Almost every page of ecclesiastical history of ancient times is full of monstrous relations of the powers of the devil, or of those who had entered into copartnership with him; and, emerging thence into the light of more recent times, we shall find the same superstition in such men as Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder"; in Matthew Hale, presiding at the trial of the Bury St. Edmunds witches; and in Sir Thomas Browne, author of the "Religio Medici," and of the "Inquiry into Vulgar Errors," giving the evidence on which so many wretched old and young women were sent to the gallows. But, alas! what shall we say when we hear such holy men as Baxter and Wesley asserting that the belief in witchcraft was essentially connected with Christianity, and one of its most important points; and, down almost to our own day, find Johnson half doubting and half believing in the existence of witches and in their supernatural powers? It was not until the close of 1763 that the statute which made witchcraft a felony punishable by death was repealed; and so lately as 1716 the curious reader will find in Gough's Brit., Vol. I., p. 439, an account of a substantial English farmer, named Hicks, who publicly accused his wife and child--a girl of only nine years of age--of witchcraft; and, what seems more incredible still, that they were actually tried at the assizes at Huntingdon before a learned judge, and visited by pious and God-fearing "divines" to whom the poor victims confessed the belief--which was forced into their own convictions by the strong current of public opinion, and still more by the unnatural conduct of a father and a husband--"that they were witches"; for which the unhappy wife and tender child were hanged at Huntingdon, on the 28th of July, 1716. Can any page in the history of Siam be more appalling than this? Let the reader turn from England in her light and glory, her civilization, refinement, and power, from her altars raised to the true God, and centuries after her baptism in the matchless name of Christ, to benighted Siam still bound in the iron fetters of paganism, idolatry, and slavery, and he will find there in many respects just such a picture as England presented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nothing can be more appalling than the incurable superstition of the Eastern mind, and even while their belief in the supernatural inspires them with perpetual horror, they cannot be brought to give it up. In fact, it seems a part of their nature to cherish in their secret hearts the belief that there are spirits, good and bad, who walk the earth unseen, and delight either to bless or to cheat and abuse mankind; and that there are witches and wizards in the country who have the power of turning men into any shape they choose.