sabbath, she was dropped upon the earth in the
confusion which resulted among the hellish legions when they heard
the bells sounding the Ave Maria. It is sad to note that, after a
contribution so valuable to sacred science, the poor woman was condemned
to the flames. This revelation speedily ripened the belief that,
whatever might be going on at the witches' sabbath--no matter how
triumphant Satan might be--at the moment of sounding the consecrated
bells the Satanic power was paralyzed. This theory once started, proofs
came in to support it, during a hundred years, from the torture chambers
in all parts of Europe.

Throughout the later Middle Ages the Dominicans had been the main agents
in extorting and promulgating these revelations, but in the centuries
following the Reformation the Jesuits devoted themselves with even
more keenness and vigour to the same task. Some curious questions
incidentally arose. It was mooted among the orthodox authorities whether
the damage done by storms should or should not be assessed upon the
property of convicted witches. The theologians inclined decidedly to the
affirmative; the jurists, on the whole, to the negative.(252)

(252) For proofs of the vigour of the Jesuits in this persecution, see
not only the histories of witchcraft, but also the Annuae litterae of
the Jesuits themselves, passim.

In spite of these tortures, lightning and tempests continued, and great
men arose in the Church throughout Europe in every generation to point
out new cruelties for the discovery of "weather-makers," and new methods
for bringing their machinations to naught.

But here and there, as early as the sixteenth century, we begin to see
thinkers endeavouring to modify or oppose these methods. At that time
Paracelsus called attention to the reverberation of cannon as explaining
the rolling of thunder, but he was confronted by one of his greatest
contemporaries. Jean Bodin, as superstitious in natural as he was
rational in political science, made sport of the scientific theory,
and declared thunder to be "a flaming exhalation set in motion by evil
spirits, and hurled downward with a great crash and a horrible smell
of sulphur." In support of this view, he dwelt upon the confessions
of tortured witches, upon the acknowledged agency of demons in the
Will-o'-the-wisp, and specially upon the passage in the one hundred and
fourth Psalm, "Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming
fire."