while women, shrieking, praying, and blaspheming, were put
to the torture, a man arose who dared to protest effectively that some
of the persons thus charged might be simply insane; and this man was
John Wier, of Cleves.

His protest does not at this day strike us as particularly bold. In his
books, De Praestigiis Daemonum and De Lamiis, he did his best not to
offend religious or theological susceptibilities; but he felt obliged to
call attention to the mingled fraud and delusion of those who claimed to
be bewitched, and to point out that it was often not their accusers, but
the alleged witches themselves, who were really ailing, and to urge that
these be brought first of all to a physician.

His book was at once attacked by the most eminent theologians. One of
the greatest laymen of his time, Jean Bodin, also wrote with especial
power against it, and by a plentiful use of scriptural texts gained
to all appearance a complete victory: this superstition seemed thus
fastened upon Europe for a thousand years more. But doubt was in the
air, and, about a quarter of a century after the publication of Wier's
book there were published in France the essays of a man by no means
so noble, but of far greater genius--Michel de Montaigne. The general
scepticism which his work promoted among the French people did much to
produce an atmosphere in which the belief in witchcraft and demoniacal
possession must inevitably wither. But this process, though real, was
hidden, and the victory still seemed on the theological side.

The development of the new truth and its struggle against the old error
still went on. In Holland, Balthazar Bekker wrote his book against the
worst forms of the superstition, and attempted to help the scientific
side by a text from the Second Epistle of St. Peter, showing that the
devils had been confined by the Almighty, and therefore could not
be doing on earth the work which was imputed to them. But Bekker's
Protestant brethren drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped
with his life.

The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the
worst. So it proved in this case. In the first half of the seventeenth
century the cruelties arising from the old doctrine were more numerous
and severe than ever before. In Spain, Sweden, Italy, and, above all,
in Germany, we see constant efforts to suppress the evolution of the new
truth.

But in the midst of all this reactionary rage glimpses of right