AND TUKE.

The theological current, thus re-enforced, seemed to become again
irresistible; but it was only so in appearance. In spite of it, French
scepticism continued to develop; signs of quiet change among the mass of
thinking men were appearing more and more; and in 1672 came one of
great significance, for, the Parliament of Rouen having doomed fourteen
sorcerers to be burned, their execution was delayed for two years,
evidently on account of scepticism among officials; and at length the
great minister of Louis XIV, Colbert, issued an edict checking such
trials, and ordering the convicted to be treated for madness.

Victory seemed now to incline to the standard of science, and in 1725 no
less a personage than St. Andre, a court physician, dared to publish a
work virtually showing "demoniacal possession" to be lunacy.

The French philosophy, from the time of its early development in
the eighteenth century under Montesquieu and Voltaire, naturally
strengthened the movement; the results of post-mortem examinations of
the brains of the "possessed" confirmed it; and in 1768 we see it take
form in a declaration by the Parliament of Paris, that possessed persons
were to be considered as simply diseased. Still, the old belief lingered
on, its life flickering up from time to time in those parts of France
most under ecclesiastical control, until in these last years of the
nineteenth century a blow has been given it by the researches of Charcot
and his compeers which will probably soon extinguish it. One evidence
of Satanic intercourse with mankind especially, on which for many
generations theologians had laid peculiar stress, and for which they
had condemned scores of little girls and hundreds of old women to a most
cruel death, was found to be nothing more than one of the many results
of hysteria.(376)

(376) For Colbert's influence, see Dagron, p. 8; also Rambaud, as above,
vol. ii, p. 155. For St. Andre, see Lacroix, as above, pp. 189, 190.
For Charcot's researches into the disease now known as Meteorismus
hystericus, but which was formerly regarded in the ecclesiastical courts
as an evidence of pregnancy through relations with Satan, see Snell,
Hexenprocesse un Geistesstorung, Munchen, 1891, chaps. xii and xiii.

In England the same warfare went on. John Locke had asserted the truth,
but the theological view continued to control public opinion. Most
prominent among those who exercised great power in its beh