other his
father. The father sighing prayed for a successful journey. Touched
with a kindly feeling Sprenger asked him why he sorrowed. Because his
son was _possessed_: at great cost and with much trouble he had
brought him to the tomb of the saints, at Rome.

"Where is this son of yours?" said the monk.

"By your side."

"At this answer I shrank back alarmed. I scanned the young priest's
figure, and was amazed to see him eat with so modest an air, and
answer with so much gentleness. He informed me that, on speaking
somewhat sharply to an old woman, she had laid him under a spell, and
that spell was under a tree. What tree? The Witch steadily refused to
say."

Sprenger's charity led him to take the possessed from church to
church, from relic to relic. At every halting-place there was an
exorcism, followed by furious cries, contortions, jabbering in every
language, and gambols without number: all this before the people, who
followed the pair with shuddering admiration. The devils, so abundant
in Germany, were scarcer among the Italians. For some days Rome talked
of nothing else. The noise made by this affair doubtless brought the
Dominican into public notice. He studied, collected all the _Mallei_,
and other manuscript handbooks, and became a first-rate authority in
the processes against demons. His _Malleus_ was most likely composed
during the twenty years between this adventure and the important
mission entrusted to Sprenger by Pope Innocent VIII., in 1484.

* * * * *

For that mission to Germany a clever man was specially needed; a man
of wit and ability, who might overcome the dislike of honest German
folk for the dark system it would be his care to introduce. In the Low
Countries Rome had suffered a rude check, which brought the
Inquisition into vogue there, and consequently closed France against
it: Toulouse alone, as being the old Albigensian country, having
endured the Inquisition. About the year 1460 a Penitentiary[70] of
Rome, being made Dean of Arras, thought to strike an awe-inspiring
blow at the _Chambers of Rhetoric_, literary clubs which had begun to
handle religious questions. He had one of these Rhetoricians burnt for
a wizard, and along with him some wealthy burgesses, and even a few
knights. The nobles were angry at this near approach to themselves:
the public voice was raised in violent outcry. The Inquisition was
cursed and spat upon, especially in France. The