The torture chambers were set at work more vigorously than ever, and a long line of theological jurists followed to maintain the system and to extend it.
To argue against it, or even doubt it, was exceedingly dangerous.

Even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Christian Thomasius, the greatest and bravest German between Luther and Lessing, began the efforts which put an end to it in Protestant Germany, he did not dare at first, bold as he was, to attack it in his own name, but presented his views as the university thesis of an irresponsible student.( 258) (258) For Thomasius, see his various bigraphies by Luden and others; also the treatises on witchcraft by Soldan and others.

Manuscript notes of his lectures, and copies of his earliest books on witchcraft as well as on other forms of folly, are to be found in the library of Cornell University.
The same stubborn resistance to the gradual encroachment of the scientific spirit upon the orthodox doctrine of witchcraft was seen in Great Britain.

Typical as to the attitude both of Scotch and English Protestants were the theory and practice of King James I, himself the author of a book on Demonology, and nothing if not a theologian.

As to theory, his treatise on Demonology supported the worst features of the superstition; as to practice, he ordered the learned and acute work of Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, one of the best treatises ever written on the subject, to be burned by the hangman, and he applied his own knowledge to investigating the causes of the tempests which beset his bride on her voyage from Denmark.