I have already said that it was religious antipathy or clerical interest
that first made heresy and witchcraft identical and cast them into the
same expiatory fire. The invention was a Catholic one, but it is plain
that Protestants soon learned its value and were not slow in making it a
plague to the inventor. It was not till after the Reformation that there
was any systematic hunting out of witches in England. Then, no doubt, the
innocent charms and rhyming prayers of the old religion were regarded as
incantations, and twisted into evidence against miserable beldames who
mumbled over in their dotage what they had learned at their mother's
knee. It is plain, at least, that this was one of Agnes Simpson's crimes.
But as respects the frivolity of the proof adduced, there was nothing to
choose between Catholic and Protestant. Out of civil and canon law a net
was woven through whose meshes there was no escape, and into it the
victims were driven by popular clamor. Suspicion of witchcraft was
justified by general report, by the ill-looks of the suspected, by being
silent when accused, by her mother's having been a witch, by flight, by
exclaiming when arrested, _I am lost!_ by a habit of using imprecations,
by the evidence of two witnesses, by the accusation of a man on his
death-bed, by a habit of being away from home at night, by fifty other
things equally grave.
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