At the heart of the history of post-revolutionary Christianity in America is the relationship between race and salvation. Compared with all the busy Enlightenment rationalisation, the unequivocal egalitarianism of Christian salvation, the admissibility of all to saving grace, had a much more obvious appeal to those in immediate need of bodily and spiritual redemption. Christian slaves, Charles Pinckney and many others argued, would be better workers, eternally grateful to their owners for showing them 'the light of the true Christian faith'. John Adams and Jefferson respected slavery as a form of property and refused to take seriously a proposal to arm a slave regiment that would win freedom for its service. A bit like M. Jourdain discovering that he had, all along been speaking Prose, author owned that until deep into the twentieth century almost every great conflict in British history had been in its essence one of religion.

The right to freedom of choice in religion is indeed, as the basic Western documents claim, a fundamental human right. Though free exercise of religion is a basic human right, religion cannot be the source or ground of human rights. Author's argument places religion in a larger context of value. But it does not denigrate religion, which has been a remarkable force for good as well as bad over human history. Though the bad may be more prominent in our minds right now, fixed by terror, history is too complex to allow that as the final word. The right to decide community could not be made objective because morality divides resources among people. The argument for human rights does not travel through a religious understanding of the universe; on the contrary a religious understanding is defensible, if at all, only through the intellectually prior doctrine of human rights.

This chapter shows where the philosophical worldviews that inform the religion of Islam and the rights discourse may be distant from each other, and where they may be closer than we ordinarily realize. Rights discourse does not declare itself specific to certain countries or cultural paradigms, its attraction for its adherents is its claim to universalism. The Islamic worldview might well be shared or at least sympathetically judged by all believers in an Absolute Divine Creator: devout and committed believers in a Divinity that does not share authority are logically in a quandary otherwise. In the West, secularism is a subject of great controversy, in terms of what it requires by way of specific policies and legislative tools. Having emerged as part of the secularisation of Western society, it derives its authority from something other than a supernatural or metaphysical source.

The text of the treatise comprises a list of numbered responses to ‘reasons’, which correspond closely to sections of the printed version of Scot’s Discoverie. The text is provided together with excerpts from the relevant parts of the Discoverie for comparison, and is fully annotated. The author uses a variety of theological sources in addition to biblical quotations, including St Augustine, Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Cyprian, and Chrysostom. The treatise touches on a range of issues in relation to witchcraft, including the veracity and causes of witches’ confessions, the question of whether accused witches are mentally ill or not, whether witches are guilty of idolatry and apostasy, and the circumstances under which execution is justified. The author presents a thorough critique of Scot’s method, as well as his conclusions.