ing
the scientific elements of Roman law, they did harm by preserving
therewith other elements--Roman chicane, and Roman cruelty. In that
respect, as in others, 'Rome conquered her conquerors;' and the
descendants of those Roman lawyers, whom the honest Teutons called
adders, and as adders killed them down, destroyed, in course of time,
Teutonic freedom.

But those descendants were, alas! the clergy. Weak, they began early to
adopt those arms of quibbling and craft, which religious men too often
fancy are the proper arms of 'the saints' against 'the world.' Holding
human nature in suspicion and contempt, they early gave way to the maxim
of the savage, that every one is likely to be guilty till proved
innocent, and therefore licensed the stupid brutalities of torture to
extract confession. Holding self-degradation to be a virtue, and
independence as a carnal vice; glorying in being slaves themselves, till
to become, under the name of holy obedience, 'perinde ac cadaver,' was
the ideal of a good monk; and accustomed, themselves, to degrading
corporal punishment; they did not shrink from inflicting, even on boys
and women, tortures as dastardly as indecent. Looking on the world, and
on the future of the human race, through a medium compared with which the
darkest fancies of a modern fanatic are bright and clear, they did not
shrink from inflicting penalties, the very mention of which makes the
blood run cold. Suspecting, if not alternately envying and despising,
all women who were not nuns; writing openly of the whole sex (until
unsexed) as the snare and curse of mankind; and possessed by a Manichaean
belief in the power and presence of innumerable demons, whose especial
victims were women; they erected witch-hunting into a science; they
pandered to, and actually formalized, and justified on scientific
grounds, the most cruel and cowardly superstitions of the mob; and again
and again raised literal crusades against women, torturing, exposing,
burning, young and old, not merely in the witch-mania of the 17th
century, but through the whole middle age. It is a detestable page of
history. I ask those who may think my statement exaggerated, to consult
the original authorities. Let them contrast Rothar's law about the
impossibility of witchcraft, with the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum,
Nider's Fornicarium, or Delrio the Jesuit, and see for themselves who
were the false teachers. And if they be told, that the cruelti