d in Howitt's _History of the Supernatural_).
The eloquent controversialist Bossuet and the Catholics have
been careful to avail themselves of the impetuosity and
incautiousness of the great German Reformer.

Of all the leaders of the religious revolution of the
sixteenth century, the Reformer of Zurich was probably the
most liberally inclined; and Zuinglius' unusual charity
towards those ancient sages and others who were ignorant of
Christianity, which induced him to place the names of
Aristides, Socrates, the Gracchi, &c., in the same list with
those of Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, who should meet in the
assembly of the virtuous and just in the future life, obliged
Luther openly to profess of his friend that 'he despaired of
his salvation,' and has provoked the indignation of the
bishop of Meaux.--_Variations des Eglises Protestantes_, ii.
19 and 20.

On the eve of the prolonged and ferocious struggle on the
continent between Catholicism and Protestantism a wholesale
slaughter of witches and wizards was effected, a fitting prologue
to the religious barbarities of the Thirty Years' War. Fires were
kindled almost simultaneously in two different places, at Bamburg
and Wuerzburg; and seldom, even in the annals of witchcraft, have
they burned more tremendously. The prince-bishops of those
territories had long been anxious to extirpate Lutheranism from
their dioceses. Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamburg, a
vigorous supporter of the Jesuits, was the chief agent of John
George II. He waged war upon the heretical sorcerers in the
'whole armour of God,' _Panoplia armaturae Dei_. According to the
statements of credible historians, nine hundred trials took
place in the two courts of Bamburg and Zeil between 1625 and
1630. Six hundred were burned by Bishop George II. No one was
spared. The chancellor, his son, Dr. Horn, with his wife and
daughters, many of the lords and councillors of the bishop's
court, women and priests, suffered. After tortures of the most
extravagant kind it was extorted that some twelve hundred of them
were confederated to bewitch the entire land to the extent that
'there would have been neither wine nor corn in the country, and
that thereby man and beast would have perished with hunger, and
men would be driven to eat one another. There were even some
Catholic priests among them who had been led into practices too
dreadful to be described, and they confessed among other t