hen Friedrich Spee, the Jesuit poet of western Germany, found,
in taking the confessions of those about to be executed for magic, that
without exception, just when about to enter eternity and utterly beyond
hope of pardon, they all retracted their confessions made under torture,
his sympathies as a man rose above his loyalty to his order, and he
published his Cautio Criminalis as a warning, stating with entire
moderation the facts he had observed and the necessity of care. But he
did not dare publish it under his own name, nor did he even dare publish
it in a Catholic town; he gave it to the world anonymously, and,
in order to prevent any tracing of the work to him through the
confessional, he secretly caused it to be published in the Protestant
town of Rinteln.

Nor was this all. Nothing shows so thoroughly the hold that this belief
in magic had obtained as the conduct of Spee's powerful friend and
contemporary, John Philip von Schonborn, later the Elector and Prince
Archbishop of Mayence.

As a youth, Schonborn had loved and admired Spee, and had especially
noted his persistent melancholy and his hair whitened even in his
young manhood. On Schonborn's pressing him for the cause, Spee at last
confessed that his sadness, whitened hair, and premature old age were
due to his recollections of the scores of men and women and children
whom he had been obliged to see tortured and sent to the scaffold
and stake for magic and witchcraft, when he as their father confessor
positively knew them to be innocent. The result was that, when
Schonborn became Elector and Archbishop of Mayence, he stopped the witch
persecutions in that province, and prevented them as long as he lived.
But here was shown the strength of theological and ecclesiastical
traditions and precedents. Even a man so strong by family connections,
and enjoying such great temporal and spiritual power as Schonborn, dared
not openly give his reasons for this change of policy. So far as is
known, he never uttered a word publicly against the reality of magic,
and under his successor in the electorate witch trials were resumed.

The great upholders of the orthodox view retained full possession of the
field. The victorious Bishop Binsfeld, of Treves, wrote a book to prove
that everything confessed by the witches under torture, especially the
raising of storms and the general controlling of the weather, was worthy
of belief; and this book became throughout Europe a standar