institution. For a full account of the discovery
and its significance, see the New York Nation for November 11, 1886. The
facts regarding the after-life of Loos were discovered by Prof. Burr in
manuscript records at Brussels.

That this threat was not unmeaning had been seen a few years earlier in
a case even more noted, and in the same city. During the last decades of
the sixteenth century, Dietrich Flade, an eminent jurist, was rector of
the University of Treves, and chief judge of the Electoral Court, and
in the latter capacity he had to pass judgment upon persons tried on
the capital charge of magic and witchcraft. For a time he yielded to the
long line of authorities, ecclesiastical and judicial, supporting the
reality of this crime; but he at last seems to have realized that it
was unreal, and that the confessions in his torture chamber, of
compacts with Satan, riding on broomsticks to the witch-sabbath, raising
tempests, producing diseases, and the like, were either the results of
madness or of willingness to confess anything and everything, and even
to die, in order to shorten the fearful tortures to which the accused
were in all cases subjected until a satisfactory confession was
obtained.

On this conviction of the unreality of many at least of the charges
Flade seems to have acted, and he at once received his reward. He was
arrested by the authority of the archbishop and charged with having sold
himself to Satan--the fact of his hesitation in the persecution being
perhaps what suggested his guilt. He was now, in his turn, brought into
the torture chamber over which he had once presided, was racked until
he confessed everything which his torturers suggested, and finally, in
1589, was strangled and burnt.

Of that trial a record exists in the library of Cornell University
in the shape of the original minutes of the case, and among them the
depositions of Flade when under torture, taken down from his own lips
in the torture chamber. In these depositions this revered and venerable
scholar and jurist acknowledged the truth of every absurd charge brought
against him--anything, everything, which would end the fearful torture:
compared with that, death was nothing.(255)

(255) For the case of Flade, see the careful study by Prof. Burr,
The Fate of Dietrich Flade, in the Papers of the American Historical
Association, 1891.

Nor was even a priest secure who ventured to reveal the unreality of
magic. W