His
book, published in 1584, is full of manly sense and spirit, above all, of
a tender humanity that gives it a warmth which we miss in every other
written on the same side. In the dedication to Sir Roger Manwood he says:
"I renounce all protection and despise all friendship that might serve
towards the suppressing or supplanting of truth." To his kinsman, Sir
Thomas Scot, he writes: "My greatest adversaries are _young ignorance_
and _old custom_; for what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it
is so superstitiously pursued of some, as though no error could be
acquainted with custom." And in his Preface he thus states his motives:
"God that knoweth my heart is witness, and you that read my book shall
see, that my drift and purpose in this enterprise tendeth only to these
respects. First, that the glory and power of God be not so abridged and
abased as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman, whereby
the work of the Creator should be attributed to the power of a creature.
Secondly, that the religion of the Gospel may be seen to stand without
such peevish trumpery. Thirdly, that lawful favor and Christian
compassion be rather used towards these poor souls than rigor and
extremity. Because they which are commonly accused of witchcraft are the
least sufficient of all other persons to speak for themselves, as having
the most base and simple education of all others, the extremity of their
age giving them leave to dote, their poverty to beg, their wrongs to
chide and threaten (as being void of any other way of revenge), their
humor melancholical to be full of imaginations, from whence chiefly
proceedeth the vanity of their confessions.
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