, having related the circumstance to
the Inquisitors, they caused the woman and several others, her
accomplices, to be taken up and chastised as they deserved.

The same author relates that a woman, returning from the sabbath and
being carried through the air by the evil spirit, heard in the morning
the bell for the _Angelus_. The devil let her go immediately, and she
fell into a quickset hedge on the bank of a river; her hair fell
disheveled over her neck and shoulders. She perceived a young lad who
after much entreaty came and took her out and conducted her to the
next village, where her house was situated; it required most pressing
and repeated questions on the part of the lad, before she would tell
him truly what had happened to her; she made him presents, and begged
him to say nothing about it, nevertheless the circumstance got spread
abroad.

If we could depend on the truth of these stories, and an infinite
number of similar ones, which books are full of, we might believe that
sometimes sorcerers are carried bodily to the sabbath; but on
comparing these stories with others which prove that they go thither
only in mind and imagination, we may say boldly, that what is related
of wizards and witches who go or think they go to the sabbath, is
usually only illusion on the part of the devil, and seduction on the
part of those of both sexes who fancy they fly and travel, while they
in reality do not stir from their places. The spirit of malice and
falsehood being mixed up in this foolish prepossession, they confirm
themselves in their follies and engage others in the same impiety; for
Satan has a thousand ways of deceiving mankind and of retaining them
in error. Magic, impiety, enchantments, are often the effects of a
diseased imagination. It rarely happens that these kind of people do
not fall into every excess of licentiousness, irreligion, and theft,
and into the most outrageous consequences of hatred to their
neighbors.

Some have believed that demons took the form of the sorcerers and
sorceresses who were supposed to be at the sabbath, and that they
maintained the simple creatures in their foolish belief, by appearing
to them sometimes in the shape of those persons who were reputed
witches, while they themselves were quietly asleep in their beds. But
this belief contains difficulties as great, or perhaps greater, than
the opinion we would combat. It is far from easy to understand that
the demon takes the form of