part in the travel-quickened fancy of Europe; and one can almost catch

the twinkle in the eye of the monkish story-tellers who pretend to
shudder at his pranks.

But the Church was in earnest. Scholasticism, alas, had not put an
end to thought. The minds it had trained to think kept on thinking;
and, with them, others who would not even start from the safe premises
of the Church. What, then, should a good mother-church do who had
expounded the universe, yet still found herself vexed by questioners
more numerous and troublesome than before? What if they contaminate
even the faithful? She preached a crusade against them, and wiped
the plague-spot from her sight. But the disease only struck in. How
should she inspect men’s hearts? She made stated confession necessary
to salvation. But the heretics would not confess. Then, in her
desperation, she hit upon that last expedient for the detection of
wrong thinking: she devised the Holy Inquisition and put in its hand
the torture. How supremely effective that was I need not tell you:
it is not its dealing with the heretics that concerns us. But when,
in the lands where the Inquisition had found entrance, heresy was
at last utterly rooted out,--when the souls of the faithful were
safe and the hands of the inquisitors idle,--then, as was natural,
the hungry organization cast its eyes about for other victims. Had
not the prince of the schoolmen, the oracle of the Dominican order,
taught that there were among men other servants of the Devil, more
subtle, more dangerous, than the heretics: the men and women devoted
altogether to his service--the witches? Already, as early as 1257, the
Inquisition had asked the Pope “whether it ought not to take cognizance
of divination and sorcery.” He had refused, unless manifest heresy
were involved. But, if St. Thomas is right, said the inquisitors,
witchcraft itself _is_ heresy. Their victims were forced to confess to
a renunciation of God and an actual pact with Satan, express or tacit,
and the Inquisition rapidly extended its jurisdiction in the matter. In
1320, the panic-stricken Pope, John XXII., trembling lest he himself be
bewitched by his multiplying foes, begged the inquisitors, in a formal
brief, to extirpate utterly the Devil-worshippers.[22] The Church was
now fully committed. The rules for the direction of the inquisitors
became ever more explicit,[23] _Summa_ and _Confessionale_ for priest
and sinner ever more diffuse, as to this blackest of the sins--“treason
against Heaven.”

But hindrance came from a more obstinate quarter. Even though the
Church were convinced, the world had yet to be reasoned with. What
was, then, this new crime, of which such myriads were suddenly guilty?
Even the great state trials of the Templars, in the early years of the
fourteenth century, with all the stir they made throughout Europe, and
with all the stress they sought to lay on the charge of witchcraft,
had not left the conception clear. The thing must be explained by the
inquisitors themselves. And so it happened that the beginnings of the
literature of witchcraft were made by Dominicans of the Inquisition.

Clever was their argument and portentous their array of authorities.
First of all, the Bible. And let the historian frankly admit that, but
for what they found here, the world would never have come to their
side. That strange sixth chapter of Genesis,--the terrible verdict
of the Mosaic code, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,”--the
story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, which seemed
to a literal age to set a divine seal on the most startling of the
witch-doctrines: had not the Devil personally appeared to Jesus?--had
he not miraculously transported him through the air?--had he not shown
himself the lord of the kingdoms of this world?--had he not sought to
make a pact with the Christ himself by offering him all?--were it not
dishonor to the Son of God to suppose that all men could resist as he
had done? These passages, and a host of others which we have learned
to forget, or obscure, or explain away, made the Bible, from first to
last, the great corner-stone of the literature of witchcraft.[24] Yet
this was but the inquisitor’s starting-point. He knew how to press into
his service poet and philosopher, the apologists of the early Church,
her liturgies with their exorcisms and renunciations of the Devil,
the canons of synods and councils, the laws of Christian emperors,
the great works of the Fathers and of the Schoolmen, the lives of the
saints, the tales of the chroniclers, the utterances of the popes.

The earliest known to me of these inquisitorial treatises on
witchcraft is from the pen of the great compiler of the code of
the Inquisition, the author of the “Directorium inquisitorum,” the
Aragonese Inquisitor-General, Nicolas Eymeric. As early as 1359, only
three years after entering on his duties, he produced his “Tractatus
contra daemonum invocatores,”[25] to prove that witchcraft was heresy,
and that its punishment belonged to the Inquisition. But the world was
still hard of faith. The Inquisition in France having shown itself too
active, the Parlement of Paris in 1390 assumed to the secular courts
all jurisdiction in cases of witchcraft.

But, in 1431, the trial and condemnation of Jeanne d’Arc, at Rouen, by
an ecclesiastical court under English protection, drew the eyes of
all Europe; and, though in it the charge of witchcraft had taken but
a subordinate place, and had been used with an awkwardness at which
the judges of the following century would have blushed, it was this
charge that struck the popular mind. In 1437 Pope Eugene ventured
again to urge the inquisitors everywhere to greater diligence against
witchcraft; and in the same year the German Dominican, Johannes Nider,
put forth, as the fifth and culminating book of his “Formicarius,”
or “Ant-Hill,” the first popular essay on the witches.[26] Of their
horrible depravity he heaps up anecdote upon anecdote; and it is soon
clear that he has found a new and exhaustless source--the testimony of
the witches themselves.

Who need longer doubt the reality of the crime when its perpetrators
confess to all, and more than all, that the inquisitors have told?
Torture was a new thing in procedure, as yet unknown outside the
ecclesiastical courts; and two centuries of horrors must pass before
men should learn that its victims may confess more than the truth.[27]
No wonder that Nider’s book was popular! The literature of witchcraft
was fairly launched.

No rival appeared, however, till in 1452 the French inquisitor, Nicolas
Jaquier,[28] wrote his treatise, “De calcatione daemonum,”[29] and
in 1458 produced his monograph on witchcraft proper--his “Flagellum
haereticorum fascinariorum.”[30] Jaquier expressly tells us that his