fessions which we have
heard. And the devil is accounted so good a master, that we cannot commit
so great a number of his slaves to the flames but what there shall arise
from their ashes a sufficient number to supply their place."

Florimond here spoke the general opinion of the Church of Rome; but it
never suggested itself to the mind of any person engaged in these trials,
that if it were indeed a devil who raised up so many new witches to fill
the places of those consumed, it was no other than one in their own
employ--the devil of persecution. But so it was. The more they burned, the
more they found to burn, until it became a common prayer with women in the
humbler walks of life, that they might never live to grow old. It was
sufficient to be aged, poor, and half-crazed, to ensure death at the stake
or the scaffold.

[Illustration: GATE OF CONSTANCE.]

In the year 1487 there was a severe storm in Switzerland, which laid waste
the country for four miles around Constance. Two wretched old women, whom
the popular voice had long accused of witchcraft, were arrested on the
preposterous charge of having raised the tempest. The rack was displayed,
and the two poor creatures were extended upon it. In reply to various
questions from their tormentors, they owned in their agony that they were
in the constant habit of meeting the devil; that they had sold their souls
to him; and that at their command he had raised the tempest. Upon this
insane and blasphemous charge they were condemned to die. In the criminal
registers of Constance there stands against the name of each the simple
but significant phrase, "_convicta et combusta_."

This case and hundreds of others were duly reported to the ecclesiastical
powers. There happened at that time to be a pontiff at the head of the
Church who had given much of his attention to the subject of witchcraft,
and who, with the intention of rooting out the supposed crime, did more to
increase it than any other man that ever lived. John Baptist Cibo, elected
to the papacy in 1485, under the designation of Innocent VIII., was
sincerely alarmed at the number of witches, and launched forth his
terrible manifesto against them. In his celebrated bull of 1488, he called
the nations of Europe to the rescue of the Church of Christ upon earth,
imperilled by the arts of Satan, and set forth the horrors that had
reached his ears; how that numbers of both sexes had intercourse with the
infernal fiends; how