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 extirpated, yet we must act cautiously, lest worse come of it.

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 van

ished with its author.

In the first half of the sixteeenth century the Protestant Ulric Molitor, at Constance (De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieri. bus), 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 the two hundred victims whom in his "Cautio Criminalis." To begin with: of 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, whilst numbers, he was assured, were innocent. One of his latest experiences 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 remem ber 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.

One great abuse against which Fr. Spee had to contend - an abuse acknowledged as such by all respectable writers — was 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 po 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 escape. He divides the instigators of the prosecutions into four classes: 1. Isolated, unsympathetic students, and pious but 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 developments 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 appeal 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 morbid 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, securing 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.

Be a true father [he cries to these last] and comforter of the afflicted; beg the poor things 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

In the name of humanity, justice, religion, and patriotism Fr. Spee appealed to his country: it was not in vain. In Würzburg the executions ceased almost immediately; the dukes of Brunswick followed the example; and before the year 1631 was out, the Imperial Chancery took up the book and ordered a new edition. Sporadic examples of witch-burning lasted on far into the next century, but the tide was really turned. Fr. Spee's book, how ever, was not left unopposed. His principal and fiercest opponent was the great Protestant jurist and scholar, Benedict Carpzov, but no real head was made against him. Two editions appeared in 1632; a large portion was translated into German in 1647; a complete German translation was published in 1649, a Dutch in 1652, a French in 1660, and another edition of the original Latin in 1695.†

Spee gives an amusing story of a sud. den conversion to the cause of humanity, very much as if he had been an eyewitness. Anyhow he pledges himself that it is "no fable," as he knows both place and persons. At a place in Germany, "choke full of ashes" from the witch pyres, he tells us, a certain great prince was entertaining at his table two virtuous and wellinformed ecclesiastics. In the course of conversation the prince asked one of them what he thought of the practice they had been hitherto pursuing, of accepting ten or twelve affidavits purporting that the witnesses had met this or that person at the Sabbath, as sufficient to warrant the arrest and racking of the accused. He expressed some scruple on the point, seeing that the devil is such an absolute master of delusion. The good father answered with the a priori dogmatic glibness characteristic of those "who have been scarcely four feet from their own stoveside," that the judge might rest quite satisfied with such a number of affidavits, since it is not possible to suppose that God would allow an innocent person to be so assailed, and that he might proceed without scruple to the torture. The prince still demurred, but the priest stuck hirmly to his position. "I really feel for you, my father," the prince concluded, "for having thus pronounced your own sen.

Dub. xxx. Einleitung xvii. Cautio qu. 48.

In November, 1628, Fr. Spee was sent on a mission to Peina, a Lutheran township, which had come into the hands of the Archbishop of Cologne, and upon which he proposed to exercise the jus reformandi. To do the archbishop justice, he seems to have done little in the way of coercion, beyond insisting upon orthodoxy as a qualification for the town council. Fr. Spee met with his usual success. Few, indeed, were ever found equal to resisting his personal address. Several, even of the Lutheran clergy, were received by him, and amongst them one who went by the name of "mad Sir Tyle" (tolle Herr Tyle.) a very worthy fellow, who became quite devoted to the Jesuit. Twenty-three of the neighboring villages, and subsequently the town itself, embraced the Catholic faith. One incident in connection with this mission deserves to be minutely recorded.

On Sunday morning (April 29, 1629) Spee had to ride to the neighboring village of Woltorp, where he was to say mass. He rode alone, and his way lay over a wild piece of moorland interspersed with pine woods, when he was suddenly encountered by another rider. This man was a fanatical Lutheran, who, irritated by Spee's successes, was determined to bring them on the spot to a violent conclusion. He began by giving Fr. Spee a piece of his mind, and the missionary, seeing what was coming, invoked our Lady and St. Ignatius, and clapped spurs to his horse in a bold attempt to push past. The ruffian fired, and though the bullet seems to have gone wide of its mark, for some reason or other, Fr. Spee's horse fell. He managed, however, to get his beast on its legs, and, escaping a second bullet, dashed on for the village. The assassin, finding the pace too quick for a steady aim, drew his sword, and, as they got into the open, managed to ride into Fr. Spee, and deal him some severe cuts over the head. Still he sat upright, and his horse kept his pace, and in a few minutes the assassin was distanced, and Fr. Spee rode into the market place of Woltorp, his face streaming with blood from six wounds on the head and two on the left shoulder. There