y to say that the more severe the persecution, the
more widespread did witchcraft become. Every person tortured accused
others and whole communities went mad with grief and fear and
superstition. No amount of human evidence establishing the actual
whereabouts of the accused at the time they were asserted by the witness
on the rack to have been at the sabbath would avail. The husbands were
told that they had seen or held only the devil-created semblance of
their wives. The originals were with Satan under the oak. The
confessions of tens of thousands of witches are to be found in Europe's
judicial records of the period of the Inquisition.

"The Protestant Reformers zealously seconded the exertions of Rome to
extirpate witchcraft; they felt that they must prove that they were as
orthodox as the Catholics, and were as loyal to the Bible. No one urged
their fundamental ideas more than did Luther, Calvin, Beza, the Swedish
Lutherans, Casaubon, Wesley, Richard Baxter, the Mathers,--all stood
loyally by Rome." (_Lecky._)

At Lisbon, a horse whose master had taught him many tricks, was tried in
1601 and found guilty of being possessed by the Devil, for which he was
burned.

The witchcraft mania proper in England began in the sixteenth century
and reached its climax in the early part of the seventeenth century. Sir
Matthew Hale, the great jurist, sanctioned the delusions and passed
sentences of death by burning.

Queen Elizabeth made witchcraft a capital offense in England; and King
James I wrote a book on the subject, and lent his personal aid and royal
support to the persecutions.

Joan of Arc, the noblest of all the victims of this belief, perished by
English hands, though on French soil, and under the sentence of a French
bishop.

In Scotland, during the sixteenth century, as well as the seventeenth,
were seen the most horrible examples of what domination of superstitious
minds by ecclesiastics could do.

"Nothing was natural, all was supernatural. The entire course of affairs
was governed, not by their antecedents, but by a series of miracles.
Going still further, they claimed the power (the clergy) not only of
foretelling the future state, but also of controlling it; and they did
not scruple to affirm that, by their censures, they could open and shut
the Kingdom of Heaven. As if this were not enough, they also gave out
that a word of theirs could hasten the moment of death, and by cutting
off the sinner in his prim