232-234.] Not an importation like Quakerism, but of ineradicable native growth, was the crime of witchcraft; and, though that crime was known in England too, and occupied English law-courts, Scotland maintained her fearful superiority in witch-trials and witch-burnings.

"There is much witchery up and down our land," wrote Baillie: "the English be but too sparing to try it, but some they execute." Against crimes of other orders the English judges were willing enough to act; and nothing is more startling to one who is new to such facts than to find how much of their business, in pious and Presbyterian Scotland, consisted in trials of cases of hideous and abnormal sexualism.

But, indeed, very strange _isms_ of quite another sort, and of which mere modern theory would have pronounced the Scotland of that time incapable, lurked underneath all the piety, all the preaching, all the exercise of Presbyterian discipline, all the seeming distribution of the population universally into Resolutioners and Protesters, with interspersed Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and other vehement Christians.

Bead, from the Scottish correspondence of Needham's _Mercurius Politicus_, in the number for June 26-July 3, 1656, the following account of one of the cases that had come before Judge Smith and Judge Lawrence in their Dumfriesshire circuit of the previous May:-- "Alexander Agnew, commonly called Jock of Broad Scotland," [apparently an itinerant beggar, or Edie Ochiltree, of Dumfriesshire] was tried on this indictment.--"_First_, the said Alexander, being desired to go to church, answered 'Hang God: God was hanged long since; what had _he_ to do with God?
he had nothing to do with God'.

_Secondly_, He answered he was nothing in God's common; God gave him nothing, and he was no more obliged to God than to the Devil; and God was very greedy.