true criminals. The madness seems to have been contagious, for Protestant authorities were as bloodthirsty as Catholics; the Inquisition waged for generations unceasing war against this new class of heretics among the nations of the Romanic race. Germany saw great numbers sacrificed in a short space of time, and in sober England, even, three thousand lost their lives during the Long Parliament alone, while, according to Barrington, the whole number who perished amounted to not less than thirty thousand! If only few were sacrificed in New England, the exception was due more to the sparse population than to moderation; in South America, on the contrary, the persecution was carried on with relentless cruelty. And all this happened while fierce war was raging almost everywhere, so that, while the sword destroyed the men, the fire consumed the women! Occasionally most startling contrasts would be exhibited by different governments. In the North, James I., claiming to be as wise as Solomon, and more learned than any man in Christendom, imagined that he was persecuted by the Evil One on account of his great religious zeal, and saw in every Catholic an instrument of his adversary. His wild fancy was cunningly encouraged by those who profited by his tyranny, and Catholics were represented as being, one and all, given up to the Devil, the mass and witchcraft, the three unholy allies opposed to the Trinity! In the South, the Republic of Venice, with all its petty tyranny and proverbial political cruelty, stood almost alone in all Christendom as opposed to persecutions of wizards and witches, and fought the battle manfully on the side of enlightenment and Christian charity. The horrors of witch-trials soon reached a height which makes us blush for humanity. The accused were tortured till they confessed their guilt, so that they might lose not only life upon earth, but also hope for eternity. If, under torture, they declared themselves innocent, but ready to confess their guilt and to die, they were told that in such a case they would die with a falsehood on their lips, and thus forfeit salvation. Some of the sufferers were found to have a stigma on their bodies, a place where the nerves had been paralysed, and no pain was consequently felt—this was a sure sign of their being witches, and they were forthwith burnt; if they had no such stigma, the judge decided that the Devil marked only his doubtful adherents, and left his trusty followers unmarked! The terror became so great that in the seventeenth century repentant "witches abounded, because it had become customary" merely to hang or to decapitate those who confessed, while all others were burned alive. Hundreds suffering of painful diseases or succumbing to unbearable privations, forthwith fancied themselves bewitched, or actually sought relief from the ills of this life by voluntarily appearing before the numerous tribunals for the trial of witchcraft. The minds of men were so thoroughly blinded, that even when husbands testified the impossibility of their wives having attended the witches' sabbath, because they had been lying all night by their side in bed, they were told, and quite ready to believe, that a phantom had taken the place of their absent wives! In one of the most famous trials five women confessed, after suffering unspeakable torture, that they had disinterred an infant, the child of one of their number, and supped upon it with the Devil; the father of the child persevered till the grave was opened, and behold, the child's body was there unharmed! But the judges declared it to be a phantom sent by the Evil One, since the confession of the criminals was worth more than mere ocular proof, and the women were burnt accordingly. (Horst. Demonomagie, i. p. 349.) The most signal proof of the absurdity of all such charges was obtained in our own country. Here the number of those who complained of being plagued and injured by demoniac agencies became larger in precise proportion as trials increased and condemnations succeeded. But when nineteen of the accused had been executed, and the judges becoming appalled at the daily growing number of complaints, set some of the prisoners free, and declined to arrest others, there was suddenly an end of these grievances, no more accounts of enchantment and witchcraft were heard, and soon the evil disappeared entirely.
It was a similar return to reason which at last led in Europe also to a reaction. The Doge of Venice and the Great Council appealed to the pope, Leo X., to put a curb upon the intemperate zeal of his ministers, and he saw himself forced to check the merciless persecution. Occasionally voices had been raised, already before that public appeal, condemning such wholesale slaughter; among these were men like Bacon of Verulam, Reginald Scotus, and, marvel of marvels, two famous Jesuits, Tanner and Spee. And yet even these merciful and enlightened men never, for a moment, doubted the genuineness of witchcraft and its fatal effects. Father Spee, a most learned man, writing against the ceaseless persecutions of pretended witches, nevertheless declared, in 1631, in his renowned Cautio criminalis, by far the best work written on that side of the question, that "there are in the world some few wizards and enchanters, which could not be denied by any body without frivolity and great ignorance," and even Bayle, while condemning the cruelty of witches' trials, seriously proposes to punish witches for their "ill-will." Vaudé, the well-known librarian of Cardinal Mazarin, wrote an able work as an apology of all the great men who had been suspected of witchcraft, including even Clemens V., Sylvester II., and other popes, and a renowned Capuchin monk, d'Autun, pursued the same subject with infinite subtlety of thought and great happiness of diction in his L'incrédulité savante et la crédulité ignorante. A witch was, however, still condemned to be burned in 1698, in Germany; fortunately the judge, a distinguished jurist of the University of Halle, was remonstrated with by an esteemed colleague, and thus induced to examine himself as well as the whole grievous subject with unsparing candor. This led him to see clearly the error involved in trials of witchcraft, and he wrote, in 1701, a most valuable and influential work against the Crime of Magic. He succeeded, especially, in destroying the enormous prestige heretofore enjoyed by Del Rio's great work Disquisitiones magicæ, the favorite hand-book of judges of all lands, which was even adopted, though from the pen of a Jesuit, by the Protestants of Germany. In no case, however, were the personal existence of the Devil, and his activity upon earth, denied by these writers; on the contrary, it is well known that Luther, Melanchthon, and even Calvin, continued always to speak of Satan as having a corporeal existence and as being perceptible to human senses. The negation contended for applied only to his direct agency in the physical world; his moral influence was ever readily admitted. Sporadic cases of witchcraft, and their trial by high courts of justice, have continued to occur down to our day. Maria Theresa was the first peremptorily to forbid any further persecutions on account of Veneficium, as it had become the fashion to call the acts of magic by which men or beasts were said to be injured. There are, however, writers who maintain, in this century, and in our generation, even, the direct agency of the Devil in daily life, and see in demoniac sufferings the punishment of the wicked in this life already.
The question of how much truth there may have been in this belief in witchcraft, held by so many nations, and persevered in during so many centuries, has never yet been fully answered. It is hardly to be presumed that during this long period all men, even the wisest and subtlest, should have been completely blinded or utterly demented. Many historians as well as philosophers have looked upon witchcraft as a mere creation of the Inquisition. Rome, they argue, was in great danger, she had no new dogma to proclaim which would give food to inquiring minds, and increase the prestige of her power; she was growing unpopular in many countries heretofore considered most faithful and submissive, and she was engaged in various dangerous conflicts with the secular powers. In this embarrassment her Inquisitors looked around for some means of escape, and thought a remedy might be found in this new combination of the two traditional crimes of heresy and enchantment. Witchcraft, as a crime, because of the deeds of violence with which it was almost invariably associated, belonged before the tribunal of the secular judge; as a sin it was to be punished by the bishop, but as heresy it fell, according to the custom of the day, to the share of neither judge nor bishop, but into the hands of the Inquisition.
The extreme uniformity of witchcraft from the Tagus to the Vistula, and in New England as in Old England, is adduced as an additional evidence of its having been "manufactured" by the Inquisition. Nothing is gained, however, by looking upon it as a mere invention; nor would such an explanation apply to the wizards and witches who are repeatedly mentioned and condemned in Holy Writ. Witchcraft was neither purely artificial, a mere delusion, nor can it be accounted for upon a purely natural basis. The essential part in it is the magic force, which does not belong to the natural but to the spiritual part of man. Hence it is not so very surprising, as many authors have thought it, that thousands of poor women should have done their best to obtain visions which only led to imprisonment, torture, and death by fire, while they procured for them apparently neither comfort nor wealth, but only pain, horror, and disgrace.