he world seemed to be like a large madhouse
for witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be
at every body's call to raise the whirlwind, draw down the lightning,
blight the productions of the earth, or destroy the health and paralyse
the limbs of man. This belief, so insulting to the majesty and beneficence
of the Creator, was shared by the most pious ministers of religion. Those
who in their morning and evening prayers acknowledged the one true God,
and praised him for the blessings of the seed-time and the harvest, were
convinced that frail humanity could enter into a compact with the spirits
of hell to subvert his laws and thwart all his merciful intentions.
Successive popes, from Innocent VIII. downwards, promulgated this
degrading doctrine, which spread so rapidly, that society seemed to be
divided into two great factions, the bewitching and the bewitched.

[35] _Zauberbibliothek_, Thiel 5.

The commissioners named by Innocent VIII. to prosecute the witch-trials in
Germany were, Jacob Sprenger, so notorious for his work on demonology,
entitled the _Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer to knock down Witches_; Henry
Institor, a learned jurisconsult; and the Bishop of Strasburgh. Bamberg,
Treves, Cologne, Paderborn, and Wuerzburg, were the chief seats of the
commissioners, who, during their lives alone, condemned to the stake, on a
very moderate calculation, upwards of three thousand victims. The number
of witches so increased, that new commissioners were continually appointed
in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In Spain and Portugal the Inquisition
alone took cognisance of the crime. It is impossible to search the records
of those dark, but now happily non-existing tribunals; but the mind
recoils with affright even to form a guess of the multitudes who perished.

The mode of trial in the other countries is more easily ascertained.
Sprenger in Germany, and Bodinus and Delrio in France, have left but too
ample a record of the atrocities committed in the much-abused names of
justice and religion. Bodinus, of great repute and authority in the
seventeenth century, says, "The trial of this offence must not be
conducted like other crimes. Whoever adheres to the ordinary course of
justice perverts the spirit of the law, both divine and human. He who is
accused of sorcery should never be acquitted, unless the malice of the
prosecutor be clearer than the sun; for it is so difficult to bring full
proof