Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/565

 THE WITCHCRAFT CRAZE. 549 they were but the prelude to the blind and senseless orgies of de- struction which disgraced the next century and a half. Christen- dom seemed to have grown delirious, and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power seen in the endless smoke of the holo- causts which bore witness to his triumph over the Almighty. Protestant and Catholic rivalled each other in the madness of the hour. "Witches were burned no longer in ones and twos, but in scores and hundreds. A bishop of Geneva is said to have burned five hundred within three months, a bishop of Bamburg six hun- dred, a bishop of Wiirzburg nine hundred. Eight hundred were condemned, apparently in one body, by the Senate of Savoy. So completely had the intervention of Satan, through the instrumen- tality of his worshippers, become a part of the unconscious process of thought, that any unusual operation of nature was attributed to them as a matter of course. The spring of 1586 was tardy in the Rhinelands and the cold was prolonged until June : this could only be the result of witchcraft, and the Archbishop of Treves burned at Pfalz a hundred and eighteen women and two men, from whom confessions had been extorted that their incantations had pro- longed the winter. It was well that he acted thus promptly, for on their way to the place of execution they stated that had they been allowed three days more they would have brought cold so intense that no green thing could have survived, and that all fields and vineyards would have been cursed with barrenness. The In- quisition evidently had worthy pupils, but it did not relax its own efforts. Paramo boasts that in a century and a half from the commencement of the sect, in 1404, the Holy Office had burned at least thirty thousand witches who, if they had been left unpun- ished, would easily have brought the whole world to destruction.* Could any Manichasan offer more practical evidence that Satan was lord of the visible universe ? Novesiens. aim. 1586 (Martene Ampl. Coll. IV. 717).— Paramo de Orig. Off. S. Inquis. p. 296.
 * Michelet, La Sorcifcre, Liv. 11. ch. iii. — P. Vayra, op. cit. p. 255. — Annal.