Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/51

Rh Another still more fervid zealot of this work was this Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, court preacher of Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria from 1615 to 1638. He was somewhat celebrated as a pulpit orator, and waxed eloquent in describing injuries done to crops and kine and human beings by the maleficence of witches. "Thousands of this hellish brood have been burned at the stake" he exclaims, "and shall we accuse their judges of an unjust sentence? Nevertheless there are such extremely frigid (frigidissimi) Christians, who are unworthy of this name, and who resist with might and main the extirpation of this crew, in order, as they say, that, forsooth, the innocent may not suffer. Oh, out upon these enemies of the divine honor! Does not the Holy Writ expressly command, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live? I appeal to God's behest and call, as loud as I can, on bishops, princes, and kings to destroy with fire and sword this worst of human pests."

Duke Maximilian I was in many respects a remarkable man, with uncommon keenness of intellect, strong sense of duty, untiring energy, deep religious feeling, and rare appreciation of the fine arts, but these superior qualities did not prevent him from being a fanatical witch persecutor. This perversion of so many excellent endowments was due chiefly to his early education. His preceptor, Johann Baptist Tickler, a theologian who had dabbled in law, was the author of a book entitled Judicium generate de pænis maleficarum, magorem et sortilegorum utriusque sexus, in which the combined erudition and casuistry of the jurist and the divine are used in justification of the utmost rigor in punishing sorcery and sortilege. In 1589, when the prince was only seventeen years of age, he was commissioned by his father, Duke Albrecht V, surnamed the Magnanimous, to witness and report the torture and burning of alleged witches at Ingolstadt, and his letters, now preserved in the Bavarian archives, reveal an amount of crass credulity and callousness of soul in the presence of human suffering wholly inconsistent with the good sense and susceptibility for which this youth was otherwise distinguished. With such a preparation for the performance of his duties as sovereign, it is no wonder that his reign, extending from 1597 to 1651, should embrace the period of Bavarian history in which the greatest number of witch prosecutions occurred, and the proceedings were most systematically and relentlessly conducted by both secular and ecclesiastical tribunals. The duke pursued this course with greater energy and persistency