d authority,
both among Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was Remigius,
criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual he boasts
that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for
this imaginary crime.(256)

(256) For Spee and Schonborn, see Soldan and other German authorities.
There are copies of the first editions of the Cautio Criminalis in
the library of Cornell University. Binsfeld's book bore the title of
Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum. First published
at Treves in 1589, it appeared subsequently four times in the original
Latin, as well as in two distinct German translations, and in a French
one. Remigius's manual was entitled Daemonolatreia, and was first
printed at Lyons in 1595.

Protestantism fell into the superstition as fully as Catholicism. In the
same century John Wier, a disciple of Agrippa, tried to frame a pious
theory which, while satisfying orthodoxy, should do something to check
the frightful cruelties around him. In his book De Praestigiis Daemonum,
published in 1563, he proclaimed his belief in witchcraft, but suggested
that the compacts with Satan, journeys through the air on broomsticks,
bearing children to Satan, raising storms and producing diseases--to
which so many women and children confessed under torture--were delusions
suggested and propagated by Satan himself, and that the persons charged
with witchcraft were therefore to be considered "as possessed"--that is,
rather as sinned against than sinning.(257)

(257) For Wier, or Weyer, see, besides his own works, the excellent
biography by Prof. Binz, of Bonn.

But neither Catholics nor Protestants would listen for a moment to any
such suggestion. Wier was bitterly denounced and persecuted. Nor did
Bekker, a Protestant divine in Holland, fare any better in the following
century. For his World Bewitched, in which he ventured not only to
question the devil's power over the weather, but to deny his bodily
existence altogether, he was solemnly tried by the synod of his Church
and expelled from his pulpit, while his views were condemned as heresy,
and overwhelmed with a flood of refutations whose mere catalogue would
fill pages; and these cases were typical of many.

The Reformation had, indeed, at first deepened the superstition; the new
Church being anxious to show itself equally orthodox and zealous with
the old. During the century following the first grea