advised recourse to the
intercession of the Virgin, by a continual repeating of the _Ave
Maria_. Sprenger, for his part, always averred that such a remedy was
but a momentary one. You might be caught between two prayers. Hence
came the invention of the rosary, the chaplet of beads, by means of
which any number of aves might be mumbled through, whilst the mind was
busied elsewhere. Whole populations adopted this first essay of an art
thereafter to be used by Loyola in his attempt to govern the world, an
art of which his _Exercises_ furnish the ingenious groundwork.

* * * * *

All this seems opposed to what was said in the foregoing chapter as to
the decline of Witchcraft. The Devil is now popular and everywhere
present. He seems to have come off conqueror: but has he gained by
his victory? What substantial profit has he reaped therefrom?

Much, as beheld in his new phase of a scientific rebellion which is
about to bring forth the bright Renaissance. None, if beheld under his
old aspect, as the gloomy Spirit of Witchcraft. The stories told of
him in the sixteenth century, if more numerous, more widespread than
ever, readily swing towards the grotesque. People tremble, but they
laugh withal.[76]

[76] See my _Memoirs of Luther_, concerning the Kilcrops, &c.

CHAPTER III.

CENTURY OF TOLERATION IN FRANCE: REACTION.

The Church forfeited the wizard's property to the judge and the
prosecutor. Wherever the Canon Law was enforced the trials for
witchcraft waxed numerous, and brought much wealth to the clergy.
Wherever the lay tribunals claimed the management of these trials they
grew scarce and disappeared, at least for a hundred years in France,
from 1450 to 1550.

The first gleam of light shot forth from France in the middle of the
fifteenth century. The inquiry made by Parliament into the trial of
Joan of Arc, and her after reinstalment, set people thinking on the
intercourse of spirits, good and bad; on the errors, also, of the
spiritual courts. She whom the English, whom the greatest doctors of
the Council of Basil pronounced a Witch, appeared to Frenchmen a saint
and sibyl. Her reinstalment proclaimed to France the beginning of an
age of toleration. The Parliament of Paris likewise reinstalled the
alleged Waldenses of Arras. In 1498 it discharged as mad one who was
brought before it as a wizard. None such were condemned in the reigns
of Charles VIII., Louis XII., and