Читать книгу Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations. In Three Parts онлайн

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[1.] That this word is ranked with others, as being of the same alliance, which will carry the apprehensions of any considerate man to effects done by the help of Satan, in an unusual way, as Deut. xviii. 10, ‘There shall not be found among you any that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire’—this is not the consuming of their children to Moloch, but by way of lustration, a mock baptism, a piece of witchcraft, to preserve from violent death—‘or that useth divination, an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,’ &c.105 The very neighbourhood of the witch will tell us that this witch must be a diviner, divination being the general term, comprehending the seven particulars following.106 It would be a harsh straining to put in the poisoner, in the sense of our opposites, among the diviners. Yet the second argument is more cogent, which is this: That among those whom Pharaoh called together to encounter with Moses, Exod. vii. 11, we find witches or sorcerers expressed by the same word, מכשפים, which is used in Exod. xxii. and Deut. xviii. What can more certainly fix the interpretation of the word than this place, where the end of Pharaoh’s calling them together was, not to poison Moses and Aaron, but by enchantment to outvie them in point of miracles? which will shew that witchcraft is not poisoning, but the doing of strange acts by the aid of Satan. Neither was this the act of one man—who might possibly, together with that present age, be under a mistake concerning witches, though it be a thing not to be supposed—but long after him, Nebuchadnezzar, in Dan. ii. 4, being astonished with his dreams, calls for the sorcerers or witches, and magicians, to give him the interpretation; which had been a matter very improper for them, if their skill had lain only in mixing poisons.107