animals, and especially into wolves. On their confessing this,
and often implicating others, many executions of lunatics resulted;
moreover, countless sane victims, suspected of the same impossible
crime, were forced by torture to confess it, and sent unpitied to the
stake. The belief in such a transformation pervaded all Europe, and
lasted long even in Protestant countries. Probably no article in
the witch creed had more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its
resultant horrors.

The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the doctrines of
witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed them still further.
No one urged their fundamental ideas more fully than Luther. He did,
indeed, reject portions of the witchcraft folly; but to the influence of
devils he not only attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly
everything that thwarted or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon
his book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be
devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he
attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate's heart; to his
disciples he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting
the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he
exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger
remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence,
was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the
killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet
Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range
of literature there is hardly anything more touching than his words and
tributes to children. In enforcing his ideas regarding insanity, he laid
stress especially upon the question of St. Paul as to the bewitching of
the Galatians, and, regarding idiocy, on the account in Genesis of the
birth of children whose fathers were "sons of God" and whose mothers
were "daughters of men." One idea of his was especially characteristic.
The descent of Christ into hell was a frequent topic of discussion in
the Reformed Church. Melanchthon, with his love of Greek studies, held
that the purpose of the Saviour in making such a descent was to make
himself known to the great and noble men of antiquity--Plato, Socrates,
and the rest; but Luther insisted that his purpose was to conquer