etail, and with the most unfaltering confidence, all
the proceedings at the witches' Sabbath, the methods which the
witches employed in transporting themselves through the air, their
transformations, their carnal intercourse with the devil, their
various means of injuring their enemies, the signs that lead to their
detection, their confessions when condemned, and their demeanor at
the stake."

Something must be allowed for a lawyer's affection toward a belief which
had furnished so many "cases." Bodin's work had been immediately
prompted by the treatise "De Prestigiis Daenionum," written by John Wier,
a German physician, a treatise which is worth notice as an example of a
transitional form of opinion for which many analogies may be found in the
history both of religion and science. Wier believed in demons, and in
possession by demons, but his practice as a physician had convinced him
that the so-called witches were patients and victims, that the devil took
advantage of their diseased condition to delude them, and that there was
no consent of an evil will on the part of the women. He argued that the
word in Leviticus translated "witch" meant "poisoner," and besought the
princes of Europe to hinder the further spilling of innocent blood.
These heresies of Wier threw Bodin into such a state of amazed
indignation that if he had been an ancient Jew instead of a modern
economical one, he would have rent his garments. "No one had ever heard
of pardon being accorded to sorcerers;" and probably the reason why
Charles IX. died young was because he had pardoned the sorcerer, Trios
Echelles! We must remember that this was in 1581, when the great
scientific movement of the Renaissance had hardly begun--when Galileo was
a youth of seventeen, and Kepler a boy of ten.

But directly afterward, on the other side, came Montaigne, whose
sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without any apparatus of
method. A certain keen narrowness of nature will secure a man from many
absurd beliefs which the larger soul, vibrating to more manifold
influences, would have a long struggle to part with. And so we find the
charming, chatty Montaigne--in one of the brightest of his essays, "Des
Boiteux," where he declares that, from his own observation of witches and
sorcerers, he should have recommended them to be treated with curative
hellebore--stating in his own way a pregnant doctrine, since taught more
gravely. It