stia or victim was now the Host; the "Lugentes Campi," or
dismal regions, Purgatory; the offerings to the Manes were
masses for the dead.' The parallel, he ventures to assert,
might be drawn out to a far greater extent, &c.

[34] Conformably to this plan, the first proselytisers in
Germany and the North were often reduced (we are told) to
substituting the name of Christ and the saints for those of
Odin and the gods in the toasts drunk at their bacchanalian
festivals.

The extent of the credit and practice of witchcraft under the
Church triumphant is evident from the numerous decrees and
anathemas of the Church in council, which, while oftener treating
it as a dread reality, has sometimes ventured to contemn or to
affect to contemn it as imposture and delusion. Both the civil
and ecclesiastical laws were exceptionally severe towards
_goetic_ practices. 'In all those laws of the Christian
emperors,' says Bingham, 'which granted indulgences to criminals
at the Easter festival, the _venefici_ and the _malefici_, that
is, magical practices against the lives of men, are always
excepted as guilty of too heinous a crime to be comprised within
the general pardon granted to other offenders.'[35] In earlier
ecclesiastical history, successive councils or synods are much
concerned in fulminating against them. The council of Ancyra
(314) prohibits the art under the name of pharmacy: a few years'
penance being appointed for anyone receiving a magician into his
house. St. Basil's canons, more severe, appoint thirty years as
the necessary atonement. Divination by lots or by consulting
their sacred scriptures, just as afterwards they consulted
Virgil, seems to have been a very favourite mode of discovering
the future. The clergy encouraged and traded upon this kind of
divination: in the Gallican church it was notorious. 'Some
reckon,' the pious author of the 'Antiquities of the Christian
Church' informs us, 'St. Augustin's conversion owing to such a
sort of consultation; but the thought is a great mistake, and
very injurious to him, for his conversion was owing to a
providential call, like that of St. Paul, from heaven.' And that
eminent saint's confessions are quoted to prove that his
conversion from the depths of vice and licentiousness to the
austere sobriety of his new faith, was indebted to a legitimate
use of the scriptures. St. Chrysostom upbraids his cotemporaries
for exposing the faith, by their illegitimate