ad used this daughter as a pony in her
excursions to join the devil's sabbath, and that the devil himself had
shod her, and produced lameness.

This was the last execution that took place in Scotland for witchcraft.
The penal statutes were repealed in 1756, and, as in England, whipping,
the pillory, or imprisonment, were declared the future punishments of
all pretenders to magic or witchcraft.

Still, for many years after this, the superstition lingered both in
England and Scotland, and in some districts is far from being extinct
even at this day. But before we proceed to trace it any further than to
its legal extinction, we have yet to see the frightful havoc it made in
continental Europe from the commencement of the seventeenth to the
middle of the eighteenth century. France, Germany, and Switzerland were
the countries which suffered most from the epidemic. The number of
victims in these countries during the sixteenth century has already
been mentioned; but, at the early part of the seventeenth, the numbers
are so great, especially in Germany, that were they not to be found in
the official records of the tribunals, it would be almost impossible to
believe that mankind could ever have been so maddened and deluded. To
use the words of the learned and indefatigable Horst, [Zauber
Bibliothek. Theil 5.] "the world seemed to be like a large madhouse for
witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be
at everybody'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.

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 le