Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/54

42 consistency, produced an immense sensation and led to a fierce controversy, in which some of his academical colleagues took part as the zealous defenders of witchcraft, appealing to Holy Writ, Thomas Aquinas, the bulls of the popes, and canon law as their principal authorities. One of them, an Augustine friar named P. Angelus Merz, admitted that storms are due to natural causes, but added that spirits have a clearer and keener insight into these causes than men, and can make them operative in much shorter time than would be the case in the ordinary course of Nature. The most characteristic argument, however, was used by a Benedictine of the Bavarian cloister of Scheiern, P. Angelus März. "Our cloister" he says, "can boast of having the largest piece of the true cross, stained with the blood of Christ, in all Germany. So great is the adoration of it and so strong is the faith in it that it has been necessary to make little crosses of brass or silver, which are brought into contact with the sacred relic and then disposed of to the worshipers." He states that often as many as forty thousand of these crosses are sold in a single year, and that they serve to protect their possessors against lightning, thunder, and tempest, and especially to heal bewitched cattle. But, he concludes, "if witchcraft is an old wives' fable, a prejudice, then are we, the father friars of Scheiern, infamous cheats, liars, and jugglers" An oratio pro domo of this sort might be suitably delivered by a monk to his fellow-monastics, but sounds strangely enough in the mouth of an academician addressing his learned associates in scientific research.

Opposition of this kind only served to enlighten the public mind, and the secularization of the cloisters in Bavaria by Maximilian Joseph, in 1803, destroyed the last lurking places of the witchcraft delusion, of which the mendicant friars were the most persistent promoters. This measure was followed in 1806 by the complete abolition of judicial torture, and on October 1, 1813, by the publication of Anselm Feuerbach's new criminal code, in which heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery found no place, and the secular arm ceased to be the instrument of a mediæval hierarchy for the punishment of religious superstition. But a long-cherished and deeply rooted delusion is not easily eradicated, and although