Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/53

Rh begun to doubt the reality of witchcraft until about a dozen years before. The popular prejudice which he thought it now high time to eradicate was the tendency to ascribe to the agency of witches "all injuries, diseases, and bodily infirmities which neither the doctor, nor the smith, nor the headsman may be able to recognize or to cure" As regards the production of storms by sorceresses, he asks: "Can we reconcile it with the infinite goodness and wisdom of God that he should permit the course of Nature to be disturbed in order that an old woman may revenge herself on her neighbor?" The tales of transportation through the air on broomsticks, tongs, forks, and other domestic utensils transformed into fiery steeds, he dismissed as "the ridiculous gossip of old crones over their washtubs" But if witchcraft be a delusion, why did a kind and just Providence permit thousands of persons to be, on this account, cruelly tortured and put to death? In order to escape this dilemma, Sterzinger replies: "Do not those deserve death who blaspheme God, invoke and worship the devil, kill innocent children, and exhume corpses for the purpose of injuring their neighbors?" This question assumes the truth of the accusations usually brought against supposed witches, and proves that Sterzinger had not freed his mind from many of the absurdest prejudices of his time. The chief significance of his discourse consisted in the fact that it was delivered by an ecclesiastic before the Bavarian Academy of Sciences under the auspices of a sovereign whose immediate predecessors had been fanatical witch persecutors. It is a curious circumstance, showing how slight was the intellectual intercourse then between Catholic and Protestant Germany, that Sterzinger makes no allusion to Christian Thomasius, of Halle, who had still more effectually exposed the folly of the belief in witchcraft more than sixty years before. Sterzinger's standpoint is sufficiently characterized by the paragraph in his discussion of "Apparitions" (Gespenstererscheinungen), where he asserts that "to deny the devil is unbelief; to ascribe to him too little power is heresy; but to concede to him too great power is superstition" But once admitting diabolical agency as an actual and efficient factor in human affairs, it is impossible to draw a line at which the influence of Satan ceases, and credulity finds no stopping place until it reaches the misty plateau of the Blocksberg, or joins in the disgusting orgies of the sabbat.

Nevertheless, the discourse, with all its lack of logical force and