the conclusions of our own day. In his judicial capacity he had
presided at some trials of witchcraft. He had brought all the resources
of his scholarship to bear upon the subject, and he had written a great
part of his "Demonomanie des Sorciers" before the appearance of the last
work of Wier.

John Wier was a physician of Cleves who had in 1563 published a work
which he called, "De Praestigus Daemonum." He was quite convinced that the
world was peopled by crowds of demons, who were constantly working
miracles among mankind; and his only object was to reconcile his sense
of their ubiquity with his persuasion that some of the phenomena that
were deemed supernatural arose from disease.

"Wier," said Bodin, "had armed himself against God. His book was a
tissue of 'horrible blasphemies.' For the word of God is very certain
that he who suffers a man worthy of death to escape, draws the
punishment upon himself, as the prophet said to King Ahab, that he would
die for having pardoned a man worthy of death. For no one had ever heard
of pardon accorded to sorcerers."

Such were the opinions which were promulgated towards the close of the
sixteenth century by one of the most advanced intellects of one of the
leading nations of Europe at that time; promulgated, too, with a tone of
confidence and of triumph that shows how fully the writer could count
upon the religious sympathies of his readers: the "Demonomanie des
Sorciers" appeared in 1581.

With a man of the caliber of Bodin writing the above, it is not to be
wondered at that the mobs were so active in the "Witch Hunt." For as
Lecky cites, "Although the illiterate cannot follow the more intricate
speculations of their teachers, they can catch the general tone and
character of thought which these speculations produce, and they readily
apply them to their own sphere of thought."

In 1587, Montaigne published the first great sceptical work in the
French language. The vast mass of authority which those writers loved to
array, and by which they shaped the whole course of their reasoning, is
calmly and unhesitatingly discarded. The passion for the miraculous, the
absorbing sense of diabolical capacities, have all vanished like a
dream. The old theological measure of probability has completely
disappeared, and is replaced by a shrewd secular common sense. The
statements of the witches were pronounced intrinsically incredible. The
dreams of a disordered imagination, or the terrors