Shadwell in his "Lancashire Witches," resolved to advance nothing without authority, accompanies that comedy with ample notes, drawn from the writings of witch-believers. His witches, therefore, as far beneath those of Shakespeare, for they do nothing but what we are told witches do; the whole system of witchery is here exhibited. In his remarkable preface, Shadwell tells us, that if he had not represented them as real witches, "it would have been called atheistical by a prevailing party."

The belief in witchcraft was maintained chiefly by that fatal error which has connected the rejection of any supernatural, agency in old women with religious. skepticism; and it was fostered by the statutes, which with the lawyer admitted of no doubt. "We cannot doubt of the existence of witchcraft, seeing that our law ordains it to be punished by death," was the argument of Sir George Mackenzie, the great Scottish advocate; nor is it less sad to see such minds as that of the great Dr. Clarke, celebrated for his logical demonstrations, thus reasoning on witchcraft, astrology, and fortunetelling: "All things of this sort, whenever they have any reality in them, are evidently diabolical; and when they have no reality they are cheats and lying impostures."* The great demonstrator thus confesses "the reality" of these chimeras! Another not less celebrated divine, Dr. Bentley, infers, that "no English priest need affirm the existence of sorcery or witchcraft, since they now have a public law which they neither enacted nor procured, declaring these practices to be felony!" Did the doctor know that churchmen have had no influence in creating that belief, or in enacting this statute?

lar demonstration of the existence and operation of an intelligent invisi ble being, &c."

* In his Exposition of the Church Catechism.

Remarks upon a late Discourse of Free-Thinking, 1743, p. 47.

The gravity of Blackstone seems strangely disturbed when as a lawyer he was compelled to acknowledge its existence. "It is a crime of which one knows not well what account to give." The commentator on the laws of England found no other resource than to turn to Addison, whose gentle sagacity could only discover that "in general, there had been such a thing as witchcraft, though one cannot give credit to any particular modern instance of it." Not one of these writers had yet ventured to detect the hallucinations of self-credulity in the victims, and the crimes of remorseless men in their persecutors. The name and the volume of their own countryman had never reached them, who two centuries before had elucidated these chimeras.

After the statute against witchcraft had been repealed in England, we must not forget that an act of the Assembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland confesses " as a great national sin, the act of the British parliament abolishing the burning and hanging of witches."

The name of Reginald Scot does not appear in the Biographia Britannica; and it was only from a short notice by Bayle, that Dr. Birch in his translation of the General Dictionary, was induced to draw up a life of our earliest philosopher. Such was the fate of this "English Gentleman," as Bayle has described him; and the philosophical reader, in what is now before him, may detect the shifting shades of truth, till it settles, in its real and enduring color; the philosopher had demonstrated a truth which it required a century and a half for the world to comprehend.

That such courageous and generous tempers as that of Reginald Scot should fail themselves of being the spectators of that noble revolution in public opinion. which was the ripening of their own solitary studies, is the mortifying tale of the benefactors of mankind.

69

THE FIRST JESUITS IN ENGLAND.

THE fate of the English protestants, exiles under the Marian administration, was, as the day arrived, to be the lot of the English papists, under the government of Elizabeth. These opposing parties, when cast into the same precise position, had only changed their place in it; and in this revolution of England, in both cases alike, the expatriated were to return, and those at home were to become the expatriated.

During the short reign of Edward, conformity was not pressed; and notwithstanding two statutes, the one to maintain the queen's supremacy, and the other strictly to enjoin the use of the Book of Common Prayer, through the first ten or twelve years of Elizabeth Romanist and protestant entered into the same parish church. "The old Marian priests," whom the rigid papists indeed afterward scornfully decried, were wont to inquire of any one, to use their own term, "whether they were settled;" and were satisfied to lure from the seduction of a protestant pulpit some lonely waverer, if by chance they found an easy surrender. There were, indeed, many who would neither "settle" nor 66 waver," and these were called "Occasionalists;" they insisted that "occasional conformity" had nothing per se malum—that human laws might be complied with or neglected according to circumstances; so learned doctors had opined! The old religion seemed melting into the new, when the Romanists, of another temper than "the old Marian priests," protested against this pacific toleration and procured from the fathers of the Council of Trent a declaration against schismatics and heretics: this was but the prelude of what was to come from a final authority; but this was sufficient to

divide the Romanists of England, and to alarm the protestants, yet tender in their reformation.

The sterner Romanists gradually seceded from their preferments in the church or their station in the universities, and at length forsook the land. Two eminent persons effected a revolution among their brother-exiles, of which our national history bears such memorable traces. These extraordinary men were Dr. Allen, of Oriel College, a canon in the cathedral of York, and who subsequently was invested with the purple as the English cardinal, and ROBERT PARSONS, of Baliol, afterward the famous Jesuit. They left England at different periods, but when they met abroad, their schemes were inseparable—and possibly some of their writings; though it may be doubted whether the subtile and daring genius of Parsons, which Cardinal Allen declared equalled the greatest whom he had known, ever acted a secondary part.

Allen abandoned his country for ever in 1565. He soon projected the gathering of his English brothers, scattered in foreign lands; he conceived the formation for the fugitive Romanists of England of another Oxford, ostensibly to furnish a succession of Romish priests to preserve the ancient papistry of England, which was languishing under "the old Marian priests." In 1568, an English college was formed at Douay; in twenty years Allen witnessed his colleges rise at Rheims, at Rome,* at Louvain and St. Omer, and at Valladolid, at Seville, and at Madrid. From these

* At Rome there was "The English Hospital," founded by two of the kings of our Saxon heptarchy; a thousand years had consecrated that small domicil for the English native: but now the emigrants, and not the pilgrims, of England claimed an abode beneath the papal eye. It had been a refuge to the fugitives from the days of Henry the Eighth; subsequently this English Hospital, under the auspices of Cardinal Allen. assumed the higher title of "The English College at Rome," and the Jesuit Parsons closed his days as its rector without attaining to the cardinalship.

cradles and nurseries of holiness to Rome, and of revolt to England, issued those seminary priests whose political religionism elevated them into martyrdom, and involved them in inextricable treason.*

In these labors Allen had, as early as 1575, associated himself with Parsons, who in that year had entered into the order of the Jesuits. Allen sought the vigorous aid of the "soldiery of Jesus," alleging that "England was as glorious a field for the propagation of faith as the Indies." From that time, the more ambiguous policy and deeper views of that celebrated society gave a new character to the Romish missionaries to England, and were the cause of all their calamities; a history written in blood, at whose legal horrors our imagination recoils, and our sympathy for the honorable and the hapless may still dim our eyes with tears.

Parsons, pensioned by Spain and patronised by Rome-wide and deep in his comprehensive plans slow in deliberation, but decisive in execution of a cold and austere temper, yet flexible and fertile in intrigue with his working head and his ceaseless hand

- once, at least, looked for nothing less than the dominion of England, ambitious to restore to Papal Rome a realm which had once been her fief. This daring Machiavelian spirit had long been the subtle and insidious counsellor, conjointly with Allen, of the cabinets of Madrid and of Rome. From Rome came the denunciatory bull of 1569, renewed with an artful modification in 1580 and again in 1588; and from Spain the Armada.

The seminarists were universally revered as candidates of martyr. dom--See Baronius Martyrol. Rome, 29 Dec. St. Philip Neri, who lived in the neighborhood of the English Seminary in Rome, would fre. quently stand near the door of the house to view the students going to the public schools. This saint used to bow to them, and salute them with the words-"Salvete flores martyrum."— Plowden's Remarks on Missions of Gregori Panzani, Liege, 1794, p. 97.