or young, nor fair, but poor, and perhaps a
serf, clad only in dirty rags, could still by her malice, by
the strange power of her raging lewdness, by some
bewitchingly treacherous spell, stupefy the gravest
personages, and abase them to so low a depth? Some monks of a
monastery on the Rhine, wherein, as in many other German
convents, none but a noble of four hundred years' standing
could gain admission, sorrowfully owned to Sprenger that they
had seen three of their brethren bewitched in turn, and a
fourth killed by a woman, who boldly said, "I did it, and
will do so again: they cannot escape me, for they have
eaten," &c. (Sprenger, _Malleus maleficarum_, _quaestio_, vii.
p. 84.) "The worst of it is," says Sprenger, "that we have no
means of punishing or examining her: _so she lives still_."

CHAPTER II.

THE HAMMER FOR WITCHES.

The witches took small care to hide their game. Rather they boasted of
it; and it was, indeed, from their own lips that Sprenger picked up
the bulk of the tales that grace his handbook. It is a pedantic work,
marked out into the absurd divisions and subdivisions employed by the
followers of St. Thomas Aquinas; but a work sincere withal, and
frank-spoken, written by a man so thoroughly frightened by this
dreadful duel between God and the Devil, wherein God _generally_
allows the Devil to win, that the only remedy he can discern is to
pursue the latter fire in hand, and burn with all speed those bodies
which he had chosen for his dwelling-place.

Sprenger's sole merit is the fact of his having written a complete
book, which crowns a mighty system, a whole literature. To the old
_Penitentiaries_, handbooks of confessors for the inquisition of sin,
succeeded the _Directories_ for the inquisition of heresy, the
greatest sin of all. But for Witchcraft, the greatest of all heresies,
special handbooks or directories were appointed. Hammers for Witches,
to wit. These handbooks, continually enriched by the zeal of the
Dominicans, attained perfection in the _Malleus_ of Sprenger, the
book by which he himself was guided during his great mission to
Germany, and which for a century after served as a guide and light for
the courts of the Inquisition.

How was Sprenger led to the study of these things? He tells us that
being in Rome, at a refectory where the monks were entertaining some
pilgrims, he saw two from Bohemia; one a young priest, the