arned jurisconsult, and the Bishop of
Strasburgh. Barnberg, Treves, Cologne, Paderborn, and Wurzburg, were
the chief seats of the commissioners, who, during their lives alone,
condemned to the stake, on a very moderate calculation, upwards of
three thousand victims. The number of witches so increased, that new
commissioners were continually appointed in Germany, France, and
Switzerland. In Spain and Portugal the Inquisition alone took
cognizance of the crime. It is impossible to search the records of
those dark, but now happily nonexisting tribunals; but the mind recoils
with affright even to form a guess of the multitudes who perished.

The mode of trial in the other countries is more easily ascertained.
Sprenger, in Germany, and Bodinus and Delrio, in France, have left but
too ample a record of the atrocities committed in the much-abused names
of justice and religion. Bodinus, of great repute and authority in the
seventeenth century, says, "The trial of this offence must not be
conducted like other crimes. Whoever adheres to the ordinary course of
justice perverts the spirit of the law, both Divine and human. He who
is accused of sorcery should never be acquitted unless the malice of
the prosecutor be clearer than the sun; for it is so difficult to bring
full proof of this secret crime, that out of a million of witches not
one would be convicted if the usual course were followed!" Henri
Boguet, a witch-finder, who styled himself "The Grand Judge of Witches
for the Territory of St. Claude," drew up a code for the guidance of
all persons engaged in the witch-trials, consisting of seventy
articles, quite as cruel as the code of Bodinus. In this document he
affirms, that a mere suspicion of witchcraft justifies the immediate
arrest and torture of the suspected person. If the prisoner muttered,
looked on the ground, and did not shed any tears, all these were proofs
positive of guilt! In all cases of witchcraft, the evidence of the
child ought to be taken against its parent; and persons of notoriously
bad character, although not to be believed upon their oaths on the
ordinary occasions of dispute that might arise between man and man,
were to be believed, if they swore that any person had bewitched them!
Who, when he hears that this diabolical doctrine was the universally
received opinion of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, can
wonder that thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons should be
brought to the stake? t