Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/466

 450 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. that it was unknown in Italy as in France. All such matters are under episcopal jurisdiction, and the Inquisition cannot meddle with them unless they savor of manifest heresy. But it is heretical to assert that the future can be foretold by such means, as this be- longs to God alone ; to receive responses from demons is heretical, or to make them offerings, or to worship sun, moon, or stars, planets or the elements, or to believe that anything is to be obtained ex- cept from God, or that anything can be done without the command of God, or that anything is proper and lawful which is disapproved by the Church. All this falls within the jurisdiction of the Inqui- sition, and it will be seen that the meshes of the net were small enough to let little escape. The penalties of death and confiscation, to be inflicted by the secular judge, doubtless refer to the impenitent and relapsed, as the cases which savored of heresy were punished as heresy by the inquisitor. Magic which did not thus savor of mani- fest heresy was subject to the episcopal courts, and was punish- able by declaring the offender in mortal sin and debarred from communion ; he and those who employed him were infamous ; he was to be warned to abstain, with excommunication and other penalties, at the episcopal discretion, in case of disobedience. Yet the secular power by no means abandoned its jurisdiction over sorcery, which continued to be subject to the lay as well as to the ecclesiastical courts. The time, moreover, had not come for the pitiless extermination of all who dabbled in forbidden arts. By the Milanese law of the period the punishment of the sorcerer was left to the discretion of the judge, who could inflict either corporal or pecuniary penalties proportioned to the gravity of the offence." Sorcery was one of the aberrations certain to respond to perse- cution by more abundant development. So long as its reality was acknowledged and its professors were punished, not as sharpers, but as the possessors of evil powers of unknown extent, the more pub- lic attention was drawn to it the more it flourished. As soon as the Inquisition had systematized its suppression, we begin to find it occupy a larger and larger share of public attention. In 1303 one of the charges brought against Boniface VIII., in the Assem- lucem edita c. 63 (Bergami, 1594).
 * Zanchini Tract, de Haeret. c. xxii. — Statuta Criminalia Mediolani e tenebrisin