Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/560

 544 WITCHCRAFT. dence was needed to prove any special manifestation of the power or malignity of the witch. Told as the results of his own experi- ence or that of his colleagues, with the utmost good faith, they carried conviction with them. In fact, but for the delusive char- acter o'f human testimony in such matters, the evidence would seem to be overwhelming. Statements of disinterested eye-wit- nesses, complaints of sufferers, confessions of the guilty, even after condemnation, and at the stake, when there was no hope save of pardon of their sins by God, are innumerable, and so detailed and connected together that the most fertile imagination would seem inadequate to their invention. Besides, the work is so logical in form, according to the fashion of the time, and so firmly based on scholastic theology and canon law, that we cannot wonder at the position accorded to it for more than a century of a leading au- thority on a subject of the highest practical importance. Quoted implicitly by all succeeding writers, it did more than all other agencies, save the papal bulls, to stimulate and perfect the perse- cution, and consequently the extension of witchcraft.* Thus the Inquisition in its decrepitude had a temporary re- sumption of activity, before the Reformation came to renew its vigor in a different shape. Yet it was not everywhere allowed to work its will upon this new class of heretics. In France edicts of 1490 and 1493 treat them as subject exclusively to the secular courts, unless the offenders happen to be justiciable by the ecclesi- astical tribunals, and no allusion whatever is made to the Inquisi- tion. At the same time the growing sharpness of persecution is seen in provisions which subject those who consult necromancers and sorcerers to the same penalties as the practitioners themselves, and threaten judges who are negligent in arresting them with loss sees clearly enough that the witch-madness was the result of the means adopted for the suppression of witchcraft, but in his eagerness to relieve the Church from the responsibility he attributes its origin to the Carolina, or criminal code of Charles V., issued in 1531, and expressly asserts that ecclesiastical law had noth- ing to do with it (p. 176). Other recent writers ascribe the horrors of the witch- process to the bull of Innocent VIII., and the Malleus Maleficarum (lb. pp. 222-6). We have been able to trace, however, the definite development of the madness and the means adopted for its cure from the beliefs and the practice of preceding ages. It was, as we have seen, a process of purely natural evolutioD from the principles which the Church had succeeded in establishing.
 * Diefenbach, the latest writer on witchcraft (Die Hexenwahn, Mainz, 1886)