xtract from the pamphlet. The end of it is
edifying; the valiant Dean reaped the reward of his dangerous work by
winning the soul of Apollonia to his Church. She exhorted her husband,
and vowed a pilgrimage; and it appears that after that, the quarrelsome
couple lived together peaceably. What the religious zeal of the
narrator has added to the spiritual examination of the devil, is more
harmless than it is in many similar cases.

The tender care of both Churches for those possessed, and the pious
interest with which they regarded these victims of the devil, made
similar cases become a matter of speculation. Thus in Thuringia in
1560, a herdsman, Hans the father of Mellingen, made a great sensation.
He pretended that he had been compelled by a man of ill repute, to eat
some food which had brought him into the power of the devil; that he
had been severely handled and beaten by the devil, and showed his
stripes. He was on this account commended in pamphlets to the prayers
of Christendom. But once when he made his appearance at Nuremberg with
a bleeding ear, his hands tied behind his back with a three-coloured
cord, and there praying and begging, related his old story, that the
devil himself had thus fastened his hands, the Nurembergers, took the
matter up in earnest, and the audacity of the man sank before the
pressing cross-examination of the ecclesiastical and temporal
authorities; he acknowledged that he was a deceiver; he was placed in
the pillory, and then driven out of the town. The Nurembergers did not
fail to make known their discovery in a pamphlet.

But fierce indeed was the hatred with which was regarded, in the last
half of the century, that other connection with hell,--the old
witchcraft. Even Luther believed in witches; he mentions incidentally
that such a woman had injured his mother; and in another place was
angry with the lawyers who did not punish similar sorceresses when
they injured their fellow-creatures. But these expressions were not
intended to be very severe; he on the whole troubled himself little
with this phase of superstition. He, the copious writer, never
considered it necessary to discourse to his people concerning it; in
his sermons he only occasionally mentions witchcraft, and his whole
nature was repugnant to the application of violence. But if happily
for us, Luther's pure spirit preserved him from bitterness against
the devil's helpmates, his scholars and successors had little of his
h