Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/515

 THE SABBAT. 499 cases. This aroused the learned theologian, Silvestro Mozzolino of Prierio, Master of the Sacred Palace and subsequently Dominican General, who, in 1521, responded in a voluminous treatise devoted to the disputed canon. As the utterance of the Council of Anquira, presumably confirmed by the Holy See, he does not dare to deny its authority, but he adopts the same reasoning as Jaquerius, and laboriously argues that the heretics to whom it refers had disap- peared, that the existing witches are a new sect, originating in 1404, and that the definitions of the canon are, therefore, obsolete and inapplicable to existing circumstances. To deny the bodily presence of witches at the Sabbat, he says, is to discredit the infi- nite number of cases tried by the Inquisition, and consequently to discredit the laws themselves.* He was followed by his successor in the mastership of the Sacred Palace, Bartolomeo de Spina, who devoted three tracts to the annihilation of Ponzinibio. The latter had suggested, logically enough, though maliciously, that as the Cap. Episcopi had defined as a heresy the belief that witches are corporally carried to the Sabbat, inquisitors in administering abju- ration to their penitents ought to make them abjure this heresy among others. The absurd position in which this placed the In- quisition aroused Spina's indignation to the utmost. " O wonder- ful presumption ! O detestable insanity !" he exclaimed. " Only heretics abjure, only heresies are abjured before inquisitors. Is then that belief a heresy which inquisitors defend, and according to which they judge the enemies of the faith to be worthy of ex- treme damnation ? — that opinion which illustrious theologians and canonists prove to be true and catholic ? O the extreme stolidity of the man ! Must, then, all theologians and judges, the inquisitors themselves, of all Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, holding this opinion abjure before the Inquisition ?" — and he concludes by call- ing upon the Inquisition to proceed against Ponzinibio as vehe- mently suspect of heresy, as a fautor and defender of heretics, and Lib. 11. c. 1. Paramo (De Orig. Offic. S. Inq. p. 296) also adopts the date of 1404 as that of the origin of the sect of witches. This is probably founded on confusing Innocent VIII., who commenced to reign in 1484, with Innocent VII., who began in 1404. In the former's bull Summis desiderantes, dated in his first regnal year, he speaks of witches as a new sect, and Prierias refers this to 1404.
 * Ponzinib. de Lamiis c. 49, 50, 52-3, 61-3, G5-6.— Prieriat. de Strigimagar.