As I have already implied, the contrast in the character of the legislation of the earlier and later Middle Ages is not to be accounted for by any change of belief in the reality of witchcraft in general, what ever might be said of certain of its phenomena. The story of Cyprian and Jovita, in the twenty-fourth oration of St. Gregory Nazianzen; the famous passage of St. Augustine * on the commerce of demons with women, together with the patristic passages, referred to above, on Simon Magus, were accepted as expressing the standard doctrine by such writers as Venerable Bede in the seventh century † and by Hincmar, the most enlightened and ablest of the Frank bishops in the ninth century. Various suggestions have been made by way of accounting for the growth of witchcraft, real or putative, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Such afflictions as the black death; the disturb ance arising from religious differences; the intoxication of the new learning, may each have played their part in bringing it about. Sundry of the popes, too, contributed to the disastrous movement, especially Innocent the Eighth, in his celebrated bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484). It is, however, only fair to recognize that the popes did nothing more than accede to the demand of the whole community, accepting the evidence that was given them. In the bull of Innocent the pope endeavors to bring the trials into the ecclesiastical courts. But the whole movement was far more a lay than a clerical one. The laity carried everything before them in the witch-courts, as Spee points out, to the grievous prejudice of

De Civ. Dei xv. 23.

† See In Luc., Lib. iii., cap. 8.

See De Divort. Loth. et Teth., p. 654.

At the beginning of the sixteenth cen. tury the persecution was at its height in France, whilst it culminated in Germany nearly a century later. We have the archdeacon Remigius, in his work on witchcraft, published early in the sixteenth century, boasting that in Lorraine in fif teen years he had procured the burning of eight hundred witches. It is some satisfaction to know that he was himself afterwards burned upon the same charge. At Geneva, when Calvin was supreme, during the three months between February 17 and May 15, 1545, there were executed thirty-five witches, and amongst them the executioner's own mother. In Scotland, the Presbyterian witch executions were peculiarly atrocious. malignant prolongation of torture night. after night in order to secure sleeplessness was, I believe, a Scottish speciality.

The

In this ghastly arena Protestants and Catholics were ardent rivals, as though to keep themselves in practice for one another. In the single town of Elwang, in Swabia, during the space of two years, 1611-1613, when its spiritual direction had been entrusted by its bishop to the Jesuits, three hundred witches were burned; amongst them a young girl of sixteen on her own delation, and a young bride who on her way to church gave herself up as a witch.*

At Würzburg, between the beginning of 1627 and February, 1629, one hundred and fifty-eight witches were burned in twenty-nine burnings. Amongst them we find fourteen vicars (curates) of the principal church, three canons, several town councillors, a chancellor's widow, a doctor of theology, several youths and boys of noble family, a blind maiden, a little girl of nine with her still smaller sis. ter, many respectable burghers; Gobel Babelin, the prettiest girl in Würzburg,

Hist Prov. Germ. Sup., Decas viii, No. 184.

If neither Catholics nor Protestants can escape the guilt of the persecution, so neither have failed to furnish protestations against the abuse. The first voice raised on the side of humanity, so far as I know, was the voice of that wonderful anticipator of good things, Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa, papal legate in Germany in 1452, who used these weighty words:

Where men believe that these witchcrafts do produce their effect, there are found many witches. Neither can they be exterminated by fire and sword; for the more diligently this sort of persecution is waged, so much the stronger grows the delusion. The persecution argues that the Devil is feared more than God, and that in the midst of the wicked he can work evil; and so the Devil is feared and propitiated, and thus gains his end. And though, according to human law and Divine sanction, they (the witches) deserve to be utterly extir pated, yet we must act cautiously, lest worse come of it.t

He goes on to say that he examined two of the poor women, and found them half crazy. These he received to penitence, together with another, a convert of Denys the Carthusian. He had summoned the renowned solitary from his retreat to be his assistant in the work of gentle reformation. The light which promised a new dawn of humanity vanished with its author.

In the first half of the sixteeenth century the Protestant Ulric Molitor, at Constance (De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus), and Cornelius Agrippa, at Metz (De Occulta Philosophia), attacked the reality of witchcraft and the character of the persecution. The latter even succeeded in establishing the innocence of one of the condemned, and so saving her. His reward was depreciation, repute of magic, and frequent imprisonment.

8.

Hauber, ap. Diel, p. 34.

↑ Dæmonolog., lib. ii. 7.

Weier's

Ap. Hartzheim, Vita Card. de Cusa, pars ii., cap.

sician attached to the person of Duke William of Cleves. The book produced a great sensation, but no practical effect. The writer was vehemently assailed by his co-religionists, and if it had not been for the protection of the duke, it would have gone hard with him. In England Regi nald Scot, in Holland the priest Cornelius Loos, carried on the war against the Hexenwahn. Loos died in prison, and his companion Dr. Hade at the stake. I do not care to enumerate works on the other side, of which there were only too many. To oppose, or in any way to criticise, the conduct of the witch processes was at that time a work of the utmost peril. The Jesuit Adam Tanner, chancellor of the University of Prague, had ventured, in his "Scholastic Theology," published in 1627, to reflect upon the justice of the procedure, and to urge milder measures. After his death, in 1632, his body was torn from its grave and burned by an infuriated mob, as that of a witch-fosterer, if not an actual wizard. To use an expression of Brentano's, Spee was called upon "to stay a scythed chariot drawn by wild horses under the lash of a drunken driver." He was prepared for his task by two years of such an experience as to a man of his sympathetic nature must have been little short of a living death; and at the end of the two years it is not surprising that the authorities were glad to be quit of him. He had wearied them out with his ceaseless expostulations, and his undisguised sympathy with their victims. He left his office at the age of thirty-nine, with the white hair of premature old age, but with a heart on fire with the matchless wrongs of which he had been perforce a helpless spectator. Of what these wrongs were he gives us several examples in his "Cautio Criminalis." To begin with: of the two hundred victims whom in his capacity of gaol chaplain he had to attend at the stake, there was not one, he tells us, of whose guilt he could convince himself, innocent. One of his latest experiences whilst numbers, he was assured, were was as follows: a young woman came to him from a neighboring hamlet in great distress because people were beginning

to

accuse her of witchcraft. But the worst of all her grief was this, the anxiety lest, confessing herself to be a witch whilst on the rack, she should die with a

Einleitung, Trutznachtigall, p. xi. Leipzig, 1879. † Ap. Diel, p. 48.

Caut. Crim., 1st ed., p. 116. Trans. Germ.

chin, the very best Jesuit, the very best priest; fling him on the rack, and forthwith he will confess. Is he stubborn? it is because he is protecting himself with charms; but persevere, and you will break him down in the end. And if you want more of them, lay hold of the prelates, deans, and doctors of the Church. I'll warrant you they will soon cor.fess.

He complains bitterly of the ignorant, inexperienced priests who are sent as confessors; who submit themselves only too readily, as he expresses it, to "the judge's harness." He bids them remember that their office requires them, not to stand as a penal instrument between judge and criminal, but as an instrument of reconciliation between the criminal and

God. He describes his horror at the abuse of the sacrament of penance, when the priest gave out that he would hear no one who would not begin by confirming the truth of the rack-wrung deposition. He gives minute directions how to avoid the snares laid by unscrupulous judges for entrapping the unwary confessor into what might be construed into an admission of the guilt of his penitent. He animadverts on the rulers both of Church and State for their supineness in leaving these enormous abuses unnoticed and unredressed. Of the jurists he says:

There they sit, close to the stove, and hatch commentaries. They know nothing of pain, and yet discourse largely of the tortures to be inflicted on poor wretches, just as one born blind might compose learned dissertations on colors. To these might well be applied the words of the prophet Amos: "They drink wine from their cups, and anoint themselves with the best oil, and concern themselves not at all for the sorrows of Joseph." But put them for half or a quarter of an hour on the fire; how will all their mighty wisdom and philosophy collapse! They philosophize in a childish fashion upon matters of which they know naught.*

was

One great abuse against which Fr. Spee had to contend an abuse acknowledged as such by all respectable writers the committing persons to the rack on the mere rack-extorted evidence of the criminal. He points out that every such process had to be stopped abruptly, lest there should be no limit to the parties involved. But, further than this, Spee attacks the whole system of diablerie, so far as it is founded on the untrustworthy evidence of the witches themselves. And in this as well as other points-viz., that insensibility is a sign of witchcraft-he

Dub. xx.

of repute, such as Sprenger and Delrio. He feels that the whole system, speculative and practical, is treacherous and pernicious; and he will be stayed in his onslaught by no authority, good or bad. He solemnly challenges the judges to show him how poor Gaia, on whatever hypothesis of innocence, can possibly es cape. He divides the instigators of the lated, unsympathetic students, and pious prosecutions into four classes: I. Isobut inexperienced religious; 2. Interested lawyers; 3. The ignorant and spiteful rabble; 4. Dabblers in witchcraft, whose object is to avert suspicion. The German world of Spee's time had witchcraft on the brain. Its barest suspicion made the boldest tremble, and the fear of it clung like a blight to all the higher devel opments of life. Spee declares that many priests, who would otherwise have said lest an appearance of somewhat extra mass every day, abstained from doing so, piety should be supposed a cloak for witchcraft; and the veteran Tilly, on one of the latest of his victorious battle-fields, when struck by a spent ball which bruised the skin without drawing blood, had to divert the charge of witchcraft by an ap peal to other bloody wounds.

It must not be supposed that Fr. Spee did not recognize the diabolical reality of many of the phenomena connected with magic, and various degrees of complicity therein on the part of witches. He saw, however, that the remedy was infinitely worse than the disease; that it was no remedy, but rather the great propagator of the disease-the seat of which lay mainly in the imagination - by its mor bid excitation of that faculty; that its method of procedure was characterized throughout by hideous injustice, involving a multitude of innocent victims for one guilty. He strove, therefore, to stop the prosecutions, to stop torture altogether; and, where this could not be, to limit its use by the most stringent conditions, se curing that it should never be used more than once in the same case. Above all, he endeavored to restore the poor victims, whether innocent or guilty, to the communion of Christian charity, whence the character of witchcraft as a crimen exceptum had gone far to remove them, even as regards their confessors.

comforter of the afflicted; beg the poor things Be a true father [he cries to these last] and to give themselves wholly to you, for that you will carry them in your heart. Oh, learn sympathy with grief; feel their sufferings as though