eir master.
In Geneva, under Calvin, thirty-four women were burned or quartered for
the crime in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 1562 was perhaps
the occasion of a new English law against witchcraft. Richard Baxter
wrote on the _Certainty of a World of Spirits_. At a much later time the
bad record of the Mathers is well known, as also John Wesley's remark
that giving up witchcraft meant giving up the Bible.

[Sidenote: The madness]

After the mania reached its height in the closing years of the century,
anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry,
or a colt break its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a
murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or else a physician,
baffled by some disease that did not yield to his treatment of bleeding
and to his doses of garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that
witchcraft was the reason for his failure. In fact, if any contrariety
met the path of the ordinary man or woman, he or she immediately thought
of the black art, and considered the most likely person for denunciation.
This would naturally be the nearest old woman, especially if she had a
tang to her tongue and had muttered "Bad luck to you!" on some previous
occasion. She would then be hauled before the court, promised liberty if
she confessed, stripped and examined for some mark of Satan or to be sure
that she was not hiding a charm {657} about her person. Torture in some
form was then applied, and a ghastly list it was, pricking with needles
under nails, crushing of bones until the marrow spurted out, wrenching of
the head with knotted cords, toasting the feet before a fire, suspending
the victim by the hands tied behind the back and letting her drop until
the shoulders were disjointed. The horrible work would be kept up until
the poor woman either died under the torture, or confessed, when she was
sentenced without mercy, usually to be burned, sometimes to lesser
punishments.

When the madness was at its height, hardly anyone, once accused, escaped.
John Bodin, a man otherwise enlightened and learned, earned himself the
not unjust name of "Satan's attorney-general" by urging that strict proof
could not be demanded by the very nature of these cases and that no
suspected person should ever be released unless the malice of her
accusers was plainer than day. Moreover, each trial bred others, for
each witch denounced accomplices until almost the whole populati