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 witch's
sabbath on the Brocken? whether they had their familiar spirits?
whether they could raise whirlwinds and call down the lightning? and
whether they had sexual intercourse with Satan?

Straightway the inquisitors set to work; Cumarius, 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 tormenters 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 zeal of the enemies of Satan should cool, successive Popes
appointed new commissions. One was appointed by Alexander VI, in 1494;
another by Leo X, in 1521, and a third by Adrian VI, in 1522. They
were all armed with the same powers to hunt out and destroy, and
executed their fearful functions but too rigidly. In Geneva alone five
hundred persons were burned in the years 1515 and 1516, under the title
of Protestant witches. It would appear that their chief crime was
heresy, and their witchcraft merely an aggravation. Bartolomeo de