a Protestant denouncing the Pope. With all respect for the
Roman Church, that Alma Mater of the Middle Ages, that august and
venerable monument of immemorial antiquity, we cannot close our eyes to
the contradictions between practice and pretension upon which the
History of the Italian Renaissance throws a light so lurid.

[1] Musing beneath the Sibyls and before the Judgment of
Michael Angelo, it is difficult not to picture to the fancy the
arraignment of the Popes who built and beautified that chapel,
when the Christ, whose blood they sold, should appear with His
menacing right arm uplifted, and the prophets should thunder
their denunciations: 'Howl, ye shepherds, and cry; and wallow
yourselves in the ashes, ye principal of the flock, for the
days of your slaughter and your dispersions are accomplished.'

[2] The same incongruity appears also in Innocent VIII., whose
bull against witchcraft (1484) systematized the persecution
directed against unfortunate old women and idiots. Sprenger, in
the _Malleus Maleficarum_, mentions that in the first year
after its publication forty-one witches were burned in the
district of Como, while crowds of suspected women took refuge
in the province of the Archduke Sigismond. Cantu's _Storia
della Diocesi di Como_ (Le Monnier, 2 vols.) may be consulted
for the persecution of witches in Valtellina and Val Camonica.
Cp. Folengo's _Maccaronea_ for the prevalence of witchcraft in
those districts.

After Sixtus IV. came Innocent VIII. His secular name was Giambattista
Cibo. The sacred College, terrified by the experience of Sixtus into
thinking that another Pope, so reckless in his creation of scandalous
Cardinals, might ruin Christendom, laid the most solemn obligations on
the Pope elect. Cibo took oaths on every relic, by every saint, to every
member of the conclave, that he would maintain a certain order of
appointment and a purity of election in the Church. No Cardinal under
the age of thirty, not more than one of the Pope's own blood, none
without the rank of Doctor of Theology or Law, were to be elected, and
so forth. But as soon as the tiara was on his head, he renounced them
all as inconsistent with the rights and liberties of S. Peter's Chair.
Engagements made by the man might always be broken by the Pope. Of
Innocent's Pontificate little need be said. He was the first Pope
publicly to acknowledge his seve