De betoverde weereld ... in vier boeken

24, 25

(24.)

The third Order consists of all kinds of reasons and sayings, scattered here and there, on these matters, whether concerning persons or actions, wherein I seek if there also lies something from which one might notice what was previously written: but having devoted the entire tenth chapter to that, I find nothing other than what I had found in the previous ones.

Just as I proceeded in the third chapter from special fellowship with the Devil to an express covenant, or how reason gives knowledge of it: so I do here also with the Scripture. For in the two next chapters I go through the same thoroughly, and pause at all those places where I perceive even the very least word of a Covenant, that is not with God, or against God, or with sin, or for evil. Yet I find nothing that mentions a Covenant with the Devil, or that even looks like it. This is finished in the eleventh chapter. The twelfth takes the thread of the Holy Scriptures by the end, and goes therewith through God's Covenant from Abraham to Christ, observing whether by that way there is any room for the Devil to set up such a blokverbond counter-pact/rival covenant alongside it. And so I find and show then, that the opinion of such a Covenant of men with the Devil, by virtue of which all practices of witchcraft should happen, can in no way exist, either with the content of the Doctrine, or with the governance of God's Covenant, both before and under the Law, and least of all under the Euangelium Gospel.

Thus it is then shown so far, that the common opinion of Witchcraft and what is attached to it is entirely outside, and what is more, against the Scripture: now it stands for us further to see what that may be that the Scripture says of such people, and what it witnesses of their doing. This I point out in 5 chapters, and that in a two-fold way: first that they are portrayed vividly with their bervden practices/occupations, with which the Scripture generally puts them on display, in the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters; and then, what consequently according to that description is to be held of it.

But the first I still have the Reader notice with that distinction, that I first bring the Persons forward again, to show what was to be expected from such people, where they also had marks, for which they were liked and

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(25.)

put to work by the great and the common people; thereafter in the fourteenth, to consider their actions and arts with which they went to work, showing thereby the reasons that moved the people, and especially the kings, even in Israel, to hang themselves upon these people.

The other now goes to the judgment, of what is actually to be held of all that people according to the Scripture. This I show in the following chapters; and first in the fifteenth, that their doing was of no power, that they did not know what they predicted, or revealed as a singular mystery, and that they truly did nothing at all of what they undertook or presumed, but only knew how to make such a show, in which all their art consisted. But since the Scripture seems in several places to speak so, as if it also places no small power in the Conjurations of the Sorcerers themselves: so I investigate in the sixteenth chapter what is actually made known thereby; and conclude that the Scripture does not say what it seems to say there.

All this thus treated must finally oblige me to say (as I do in the seventeenth chapter) wherein the evil actually consists, why those people with their arts, and specifically those of Israel who associated with them, stand on such a bad word in the Bible, and since then also have been hated and punished by the first Christianity: and what the reason of the laws was, by which the same are forbidden under the Old and New Testament.

Up to here I have only spoken of those who would have fellowship with the Devil, and be at one with him: there I still add a chapter (which is the eighteenth) of such as one considers to have him mostly against them, and are in real battle with him in the spirit, or are miserably tormented in the body, that is, beseten zijn being possessed. This last here only briefly; as that was treated at the broadest in the 2nd Book, where it was appropriate, in the 26th to 30th chapters.

The 1st part of my 3rd Book being herewith finished: I then go to show finally what one shall make of all those things. I take up this work in two parts: first to show what our judgment ought to be here, doing such in the 19th, 20th, and 22nd chapters; and in the last how a Christian has to behave himself concerning this.