Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/29

 Rh, It would seem, that, when cut away from communion with the angelic world and saints departed, men’s minds fastened the more readily upon a supernatural system of another order. Curiously enough, Martin Luther fell a prey to the grossest superstition. Witness the following extracts from his Table Talk, quoted in the Introduction to Thorpe’s Mythology, vol. ii.:—

“Changelings (Wechselbälge) and Kielkropfs, Satan lays in the place of the genuine children, that people may be tormented with them. He often carries off young maidens into the water, has intercourse with them, and keeps them with him until they have been delivered, then lays such children in cradles, takes the genuine children out, and carries them away. But such changelings, it is said, do not live more than eighteen or twenty years.” Again: “Eight years ago there was a changeling in Dessau, which I, Dr. Martin Luther, have both seen and touched: it was twelve years old, and had all its senses, so that people thought it was a proper child; but that mattered little, for it only ate, and that as much as any four ploughmen or thrashers, and when any one touched it, it screamed; when things in the house went wrong, so that any damage took place, it laughed and was merry; but if things went well it cried. Thereupon I said to the Prince of Anhalt, ‘If I were prince or ruler here I would have this child thrown into the water, into the Moldau, that flows by Dessau, and would run the risk of being a homicide.’ But the Elector of Saxony, who was then at Dessau, and the Prince of Anhalt, would not follow my advice. I then said they ought to cause a pater-noster to be said in the church, that God would take the devil away from them. This was done daily at Dessau, and the said changeling died two years after.”

On at least one point the early Scotch and English Calvinistic divines showed the greatest credulity. It is notorious that they believed unhesitatingly in the existence of sorcery, and were ever ready to extend and enforce the legal penalties against it. “It is not to be denied,” says Sir Walter Scott, “that the Presbyterian ecclesiastics, who in Scotland were often appointed by the Privy Council commissioners for the trial of witchcraft, evinced a very extraordinary degree of credulity in such cases,