ghest it has the power
to inflict, sufficiently severe, it has left such criminals to be dealt
with by the secular power.

"It has been the general feeling of all nations that such criminals
ought to be condemned to death, and all the ancients were of the same
opinion. The law of the "Twelve Tables," which was the principal of the
Roman laws, ordains the same punishment. All jurisconsults agreed in
it, as well as the constitutions of the Emperors, and more especially
those of Constantine and Theodosius, who, enlightened by the Gospel,
not only renewed the same punishment, but also deprived, expressly, all
persons found guilty of witchcraft of the right of appeal, and declared
them to be unworthy of a prince's mercy. And Charles VIII, Sire,
inspired by the same sentiments, passed that beautiful and severe
ordinance (cette belle et severe ordonnance), which enjoined the judges
to punish witches according to the exigencies of the case, under a
penalty of being themselves fined or imprisoned, or dismissed from
their office; and decreed, at the same time, that all persons who
refused to denounce a witch, should be punished as accomplices; and
that all, on the contrary, who gave evidence against one, should be
rewarded.

"From these considerations, Sire, and in the execution of so holy an
ordinance, your parliaments, by their decrees, proportion their
punishments to the guilt of the offenders: and your Parliament of
Normandy has never, until the present time, found that its practice was
different from that of other courts; for all the books which treat upon
this matter cite an infinite number of decrees condemning witches to be
burnt, or broken on the wheel, or to other punishments. The following
are examples:--In the time of Chilperic, as may be seen in Gregory of
Tours, b. vi, c. 35 of his History of France: all the decrees of the
Parliament of Paris passed according to, and in conformity with, this
ancient jurisprudence of the kingdom, cited by Imbert, in his "Judicial
Practice;" all those cited by Monstrelet, in 1459, against the witches
of Artois; the decrees of the same Parliament, of the 13th of October
1573, against Mary Le Fief, native of Saumur; of the 21st of October
1596, against the Sieur de Beaumont, who pleaded, in his defence, that
he had only sought the aid of the devil for the purpose of unbewitching
the afflicted and of curing diseases; of the 4th of July 1606, against
Francis du Bose; of the 20th of July