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During the early eighties John Brinley, Henry Hallywell, and Richard Bovet launched their little boats into the sea of controversy. Brinley was a bold plagiarist of Bernard, Hallywell a logical but dull reasoner from the Bible, Bovet a weakened solution of Glanvill. We turn now from the special literature of witchcraft to a sketch of the incidental evidences of opinion.
Henry Hallywell, a Cambridge master of arts and sometime fellow of Christ's College, issued in 1681 Melampronoea, or a Discourse of the Polity and Kingdom of Darkness, Together with a Solution of the chiefest Objections brought against the Being of Witches. Hallywell was another in the long list of Cambridge men who defended superstition.
The history of witch literature has been in no small degree the record of clerical opinion. Glanvill, Casaubon, Muggleton, Camfield, and Hallywell were all clergymen. Fortunately we have the opinions of at least half a dozen other churchmen. It will be remembered that Oliver Heywood, the famous Non-Conformist preacher of Lancashire, believed, though not too implicitly, in witchcraft.
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