d themselves with unsurpassed zeal.
Not content with trying and punishing people brought before them, they
put forth _The Witches' Hammer_, [Sidenote: _Malleus Maleficarum_, 1487]
called by Lea the most portentous monument of superstition ever produced.
In the next two centuries it was printed twenty-nine times. The
University of Cologne at once decided that to doubt the reality of
witchcraft was a crime. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand,
having all it could do with Jews and heretics, treated witchcraft as a
diabolical delusion.

[Sidenote: Inquisition]

Though most men, including those whom we consider the choice and
master-spirits of the age, Erasmus and More, firmly believed in the
objective reality of witchcraft, they were not obsessed by the subject,
as were their immediate posterity. Two causes may be found for the
intensification of the fanaticism. The first was the use of torture by
the Inquisition. [Sidenote: Torture] The crime was of such a nature
that it could hardly be proved save by confession, and this, in general,
could be extracted only by the infliction of pain. It is instructive to
note that in England where the spirit of the law was averse to torture,
no progress in witch-hunting took place until a substitute for the rack
had been found, first in pricking the body of the witch with pins to find
the anaesthetic spot supposed to mark her, and secondly in depriving her
of sleep.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

A second patent cause of the mania was the zeal and the bibliolatry of
Protestantism. The religious debate heated the spiritual atmosphere and
turned men's thoughts to the world of spirits. Such texts, continually
harped upon, as that on the witch of Endor, the injunction, "Thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live," and the demoniacs of the New Testament,
weighed heavily upon the shepherds of the people and upon their flocks.
Of the reality of witchcraft Luther harbored not a doubt. The first use
he made of the ban was to {656} excommunicate reputed witches. Seeing an
idiotic child, whom he regarded as a changeling, he recommended the
authorities to drown it, as a body without a soul. Repeatedly, both in
private talk and in public sermons, he recommended that witches should be
put to death without mercy and without regard to legal niceties. As a
matter of fact, four witches were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540.

The other Protestants hastened to follow the bad example of th