element would not receive those who had renounced the privileges of baptism; and his authority no doubt gave encouragement to innumerable judicial murders. However, fortunately for the morals of the people of Scotland, they decently wrapped the naked woman in a sheet before tying her thumbs and toes together. The red-hot iron ordeal (judicium ferri) was also at an early date used where accusa tions of witchcraft were made. However, in 1487, the Inquisitor Sprenger doubted the wisdom of using this test, and thought that the willingness of the accused to undergo this ordeal was a sign of guilt as showing that she knew that Satan would carry her through it unscathed. Practically the sole defence of the unfor tunate accused lay in her showing that the witnesses were disabled by enmity; but then the enmity had to be of the most violent character, for some hostility must always be involved, as witches are odious to everyone. The names of the witnesses, however, were generally suppressed, or given so as to mis lead; or the accused was first induced to say she did not know them, or that they were her friends, so as to discount her subsequent objections to their evidence. If counsel was asked the Court appointed him, but all he could do was to advise as to confession or disabling the witnesses; if he attempted any of his ordinary tricks of trade he was in danger of excommunication as a fautor of heresy, and his risk was greater than his client's. Seldom was an appeal allowed to be made, never except for unjust proceedings, such as refusing counsel and improper torture. When convicted by a secular court the witch was invariably burned, and the Inquisition after the middle of the fifteenth century came to adopt the same practice. There was no hope, even though she repented, confessed and sought for pardon. Poor Joan of Arc had found this years before. The earliest detailed account of a witchcraft epidemic was written in 1337. Witches, of
course, had existed from the days of Moses; but the dread of them was not great, nor did they increase rapidly until the fifteenth cen tury. Then the wretchedness of the peasan try, reckless as to the present and hopeless &s to the future, led thousands to wish that they could, by transferring their allegiance to Satan, find some momentary relief from the sordid miseries of life. The tales of the sensual delights of the Sabbat, where ex quisite meats and drinks were furnished in abundance, had an irresistible allurement for men on the verge of starvation. Sprenger says the attraction of intercourse vith inciibi and succubae was a principal cause of luring souls to ruin. The devastating wars and bands of cruel pillagers reduced whole popu lations to despair, and fancying themselves abandoned by God they turned to Satan for help. The seduction of young girls recruited the army of witches : scorned by society they sought to avenge themselves on it. Many excitable minds fancied they had really ob tained admission to these foul mysteries. The weak and the poor found protection in the reputation of being in league with the Evil One, and many won gain by opposing and curing the ill deeds of others. The Church, in its alarm, stimulated this new heresy in its endeavor to repress it. Every inquisitor whom it commissioned to suppress witch craft was an active missionary, who scattered the baneful seeds ever more widely. "Hid eous are the details of the persecution of witches in the fifteenth century, but they were but the prelude to the blind and sense less orgies of destruction which disgraced the next century and a half. Christendom seemed to have grown delirious, and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power seen in the endless smoke of the holocausts which bore witness to his triumph over the Almighty. Protestant and Catholic rivalled each other in the madness of the hour. Witches were burned, no longer in ones and twos, but in scores and hundreds. Paramo boasts that in a century and a half from 1404. the Holy Office had burned at least 30,000
