to the witch, Heaven was no less merciful than to us, in that it forced ordeals upon her which, when she passed them, brought her happiness, but which, when she failed to pass them, brought her suffering.
It is noticeable that most of the witches who came to grief, and who confessed to intercourse with the Devil, referred to certain ceremonies customary at each "Sabbath" although records of witchcraft point rather to subjective illusion of performing abominable rites, which symbolized abnormal vices. For details, the reader may refer to almost any work on witchcraft. He will there see, that with all the fuss made by the judges and persecutors about this intercourse with Satan, there was very little of real impurity, and what there was, seems to have been entirely subjective the illusion of an insane imagining. In short, the witch, as well as other brides of angelic lovers, was evidently far from impure-minded by nature at the start, and this, too, in an age of vulgar expressions, coarse ideas and from which even the genius of a Shakspeare did not escape without contamination. Yet these women were mostly illiterate and miserably poor. It is probable that their poverty, however, had been their educator in ascetic deprivation and in bearing up under slights from more fortunate neighbors, and so had laid the foundations of that stern control of self which is absolutely necessary in the true occultist. That this feature their feelings under slights received from neighbors played an important part in their thoughts and consequently in their development, is shown by the fact that many of their attempts (real or supposed) at bewitching, date from an unkind refusal of a neighbor to give them a bowl of soup or an old shirt. Ill-temper, then, morose broodings over wrongs, general sourness of spirit, were not the least important of the causes which turned those earthly partners of angelic bridegrooms into devil-handed witches.
Another cause seems to have been their failure to think clearly and without prejudice. Poor creatures! They were nearly all of them prejudiced (i. e., "pre-judgers") from beginning to end. They pre- judged angels to be the
