by their sorceries they afflicted both man and beast;
how they blighted the marriage-bed, destroyed the births of women and the
increase of cattle; and how they blasted the corn on the ground, the
grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, and the herbs of the
field. In order that criminals so atrocious might no longer pollute the
earth, he appointed inquisitors in every country, armed with the apostolic
power to convict and punish.

It was now that the _Witch Mania_, properly so called, may be said to have
fairly commenced. Immediately a class of men sprang up in Europe, who made
it the sole business of their lives to discover and burn the witches.
Sprenger, in Germany, was the most celebrated of these national scourges.
In his notorious work, the _Malleus Maleficarum_, he laid down a regular
form of trial, and appointed a course of examination by which the
inquisitors in other countries might best discover the guilty. The
questions, which were always enforced by torture, were of the most absurd
and disgusting nature. The inquisitors were required to ask the suspected
whether they had midnight meetings with the devil? whether they attended
the witches' sabbath on the Brocken? whether they had their familiar
spirits? whether they could raise whirlwinds and call down the lightning?
and whether they had had sexual intercourse with Satan?

Straightway the inquisitors set to work: Cumanus, in Italy, burned
forty-one poor women in one province alone; and Sprenger, in Germany,
burned a number which can never be ascertained correctly, but which, it is
agreed on all hands, amounted to more than five hundred in a year. The
great resemblance between the confessions of the unhappy victims was
regarded as a new proof of the existence of the crime. But this is not
astonishing. The same questions from the _Malleus Maleficarum_ were put to
them all, and torture never failed to educe the answer required by the
inquisitor. Numbers of people, whose imaginations were filled with these
horrors, went further in the way of confession than even their tormentors
anticipated, in the hope that they would thereby be saved from the rack,
and put out of their misery at once. Some confessed that they had had
children by the devil; but no one who had ever been a mother gave
utterance to such a frantic imagining, even in the extremity of her
anguish. The childless only confessed it, and were burned instanter as
unworthy to live.

For fear the