page image). Where is it written in all the Old and New Testaments that a witch is a murderer, or hath power to kill by witchcraft, or to afflict with any disease or infirmity? Where is it written that witches have biggs (nipples) for imps to suck on ... that the devil setteth privy marks upon witches ... that witches can hurt corn or cattle ... or can fly in the air .... Where do we read of a he-devil or she-devil, called incubus or succubus, that useth generation or copulation? Ady's anti-Catholicism is ferocious. If he earnestly wants to end one persecution, he is willing to start another: He that will be zealous for God, in obeying the command given in Exod. 22.18. Suffer not a Witch to live, must leave his fond ignorant course of teaching people to hang up poor, and widows, and aged, and lame helpless people, and must bend his devotion against that Whore of Rome (as all the world ought to do) as also against the Mahometan Witches among the Turks. Therefore it were a good Law in England, if duly kept, That no Jesuite, or Popish Priest should be suffered to live, in any part of these Dominions, because these Witches are they that bewitch the people (where they be tollerated) by their several deluding impostures, leading the people to Idolatry, and also to the undermining of Governments. Ady's view is that the Civil War was God punishing the English for shedding innocent blood in witchcraft persecutions. He expresses particular disgust for the techniques of sleep-deprivation by which Matthew Hopkins coerced confessions, and is indignant about the execution in 1645 of an octogenarian minister, Master Lewis, on the basis of wild stories and purported teats on the old man's body (haemorrhoids, says Ady). Ady points to both Scotland and Germany as places where the misguided attempt to deflect God's wrath by action against 'witches' has in practice drawn down that very wrath on each nation. In dealing with apparently voluntary confessions, Ady takes an enlightened view that those who confess are just melancholics (mentally disturbed) who have been given by demonology a template to which they conform themselves in their delusions: Truly if such Doctrins had not been taught to such people formerly, their melancholly distempers had not had any such objects to work upon, but who shall at last answer for their