last trial of a witch was in 1712, when some clergymen in Hertfordshire
prosecuted Jane Wenham. The jury found her guilty, but the judge, who
had summed up in her favour, was able to procure the remission of her
sentence; and the laws against witchcraft were repealed in 1735. John
Wesley said with perfect truth that to disbelieve in witchcraft is to
disbelieve in the Bible. In France and in Holland the decline of belief
and interest in this particular form of Satan’s activity was
simultaneous. In Scotland, where theology was very powerful, a woman was
burnt in 1722. It can be no mere coincidence that the general decline of
this superstition belongs to the age which saw the rise of modern
science and modern philosophy.

Hobbes, who was perhaps the most brilliant English thinker of the
seventeenth century, was a freethinker and materialist. He had come
under the influence of his friend the French philosopher Gassendi, who
had revived materialism in its Epicurean shape. Yet he was a champion
not of freedom of conscience but of coercion in its most uncompromising
form. In the political theory which he expounded in Leviathan, the
sovran has autocratic power in the domain of doctrine,

[131] as in everything else, and it is the duty of subjects to conform
to the religion which the sovran imposes. Religious persecution is thus
defended, but no independent power is left to the Church. But the
principles on which Hobbes built up his theory were rationalistic. He
separated morality from religion and identified “the true moral
philosophy” with the “true doctrine of the laws of nature.” What he
really thought of religion could be inferred from his remark that the
fanciful fear of things invisible (due to ignorance) is the natural seed
of that feeling which, in himself, a man calls religion, but, in those
who fear or worship the invisible power differently, superstition. In