of the rack, would
account for many of them; but even when it is impossible to explain the
evidence, it is quite unnecessary to believe it. "After all," Montaigne
said, "it is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men alive
on account of them."

"It was the merit of Montaigne to rise, by the force of his masculine
genius, into the clear world of reality; to judge the opinions of his
age, with an intellect that was invigorated but not enslaved by
knowledge; and to contemplate the systems of the past, without being
dazzled by the reverence that had surrounded them. He was the first
great representative of the modern secular and rationalistic spirit. The
strong predisposition of Montaigne was to regard witchcraft as the
result of natural causes, and therefore, though he did not attempt to
explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no
conceivable improbability could be as great as that which would be
involved in their reception." (_Lecky._)

Thirteen years after Montaigne, Charron wrote his famous treatise on
Wisdom. In this work he systematized many of the opinions of Montaigne.

Voltaire treated the whole subject with a scornful ridicule and observed
that, "Since there had been philosophers in France, witches had become
proportionately rare."

In 1681, Joseph Glanvil, a divine who in his day was very famous, took
up the defense of the dying belief. "The Sadducismus Triumphatus," which
he published, is probably the ablest book ever published in defense of
the superstition, and although men of the ability of Henry More, the
famous philosopher Casaubon, the learned Dean of Canterbury, Boyle and
Cudworth, came to his defense, the delusion was fast losing ground.
Lecky points out that by this time, "The sense of the improbability of
witchcraft became continually stronger, till any anecdote which involved
the intervention of the Devil was on that account generally ridiculed.
This spirit was exhibited especially among those whose habits of thought
were most secular, and whose minds were least governed by authority."

But the belief did not become extinguished immediately. In France, in
1850, the Civil Tribunal of Chartres tried a man and woman named
Soubervie for having caused the death of a woman called Bedouret. They
believed she was a witch, and declared that the _priest_ had told them
she was the cause of an illness under which the woman Soubervie was
suffering. They accordingly drew