Christian people, in the bosom of a culture one thousand years old, judicial murder is made a permanent institution, hundreds of thousands of innocent persons, after refined torture of the body and nameless mental sufferings, are executed in the most cruel manner. These facts are so monstrous that all other aberrations of the human race are small in comparison."[1]
It is a pleasant task to gather such cases as can be found of resistance by ecclesiastics to the prevalent mania. In 1279, at Ruffach, in Alsatia, a Dominican nun was accused of baptizing a wax image, either to destroy an enemy or to win a lover. The peasants carried her to a field and would have burned her, but she was rescued by the friars.[2] The Bishop of Brixen, in the Tyrol, in 1485, met the inquisitor Institoris, when he came to begin the persecution, and forced him to leave the country.[3] At Arras and Amiens, in 1460, the ecclesiastics suppressed a witch-persecution at its beginning.[4] At Innsbrück the bishop's representative arrested the work of Institoris as not conformable to the rules of legal practice; the questions about sex-practice were suppressed as irrelevant, and a protest was made against the superficial proceedings of the inquisitor.[5] The state of Venice resisted witch-persecutions more successfully than it resisted heresy, although it never satisfied the Church authorities; the self-centered and suspicious republic had mores of its own which withstood outside interference. In 1518 the Senate was officially informed that the inquisitor had burned seventy witches in Valcamonica; that he had as many more in prison, and that those suspected or accused numbered five thousand, or one-fourth of the population
