He found
also that the Devil who possessed her could not distinguish holy from
profane water. But that there were deceptions did not shake the general
belief in the reality of possession. The proof in such cases could not
and ought not to be subjected to the ordinary tests. "If many natural
things," says Bodin, "are incredible and some of them incomprehensible,
_a fortiori_ the power of supernatural intelligences and the doings of
spirits are incomprehensible. But error has risen to its height in this,
that those who have denied the power of spirits and the doings of
sorcerers have wished to dispute physically concerning supernatural or
metaphysical things, which is a notable incongruity." That the girls were
really possessed, seemed to Stoughton and his colleagues the most
rational theory,--a theory in harmony with the rest of their creed, and
sustained by the unanimous consent of pious men as well as the evidence
of that most cunning and least suspected of all sorcerers, the Past,--and
how confront or cross-examine invisible witnesses, especially witnesses
whom it was a kind of impiety to doubt? Evidence that would have been
convincing in ordinary cases was of no weight against the general
prepossession. In 1659 the house of a man in Brightling, Sussex, was
troubled by a demon, who set it on fire at various times, and was
continually throwing things about.
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