atan--and foremost among these was insanity.(364) It
was surely no wonder that an age of religious controversy and excitement
should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the mind; and, to men
who mutually taught the utter futility of that baptismal exorcism by
which the babes of their misguided neighbours were made to renounce
the devil and his works, it ought not to have seemed strange that his
victims now became more numerous.(365) But so simple an explanation did
not satisfy these physicians of souls; they therefore devised a simpler
one: their patients, they alleged, were bewitched, and their increase
was due to the growing numbers of those human allies of Satan known as
witches.

(364) For the attitude of the Catholic clergy, the best sources are the
confidential Jesuit Litterae Annuae. To this day the numerous treatises
on "pastoral medicine" in use in the older Church devote themselves
mainly to this sort of warfare with the devil.

(365) Baptismal exorcism continued in use among the Lutherans till the
eighteenth century, though the struggle over its abandonment had been
long and sharp. See Krafft, Histories vom Exorcismo, Hamburg, 1750.

Already, before the close of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent VIII
had issued the startling bull by which he called on the archbishops,
bishops, and other clergy of Germany to join hands with his inquisitors
in rooting out these willing bond-servants of Satan, who were said to
swarm throughout all that country and to revel in the blackest crimes.
Other popes had since reiterated the appeal; and, though none of these
documents touched on the blame of witchcraft for diabolic possession,
the inquisitors charged with their execution pointed it out most clearly
in their fearful handbook, the Witch-Hammer, and prescribed the special
means by which possession thus caused should be met. These teachings
took firm root in religious minds everywhere; and during the great age
of witch-burning that followed the Reformation it may well be doubted
whether any single cause so often gave rise to an outbreak of the
persecution as the alleged bewitchment of some poor mad or foolish or
hysterical creature. The persecution, thus once under way, fed itself;
for, under the terrible doctrine of "excepted cases," by which in the
religious crimes of heresy and witchcraft there was no limit to the use
of torture, the witch was forced to confess to accomplices, who in turn
accused