Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/189

Rh to explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no conceivable improbability could be as great as that which would be involved in their reception." (Lecky.)

Thirteen years after Montaigne, Charron wrote his famous treatise on Wisdom. In this work he systematized many of the opinions of Montaigne.

Voltaire treated the whole subject with a scornful ridicule and observed that, "Since there had been philosophers in France, witches had become proportionately rare."

In 1681, Joseph Glanvil, a divine who in his day was very famous, took up the defense of the dying belief. "The Sadducismus Triumphatus," which he published, is probably the ablest book ever published in defense of the superstition, and although men of the ability of Henry, More, the famous philosopher Casaubon, the learned Dean of Canterbury, Boyle and Cudworth, came to his defense, the delusion was fast losing ground. Lecky points out that by this time, "The sense of the improbability of witchcraft became continually stronger, till any anecdote which involved the intervention of the Devil was on that account generally ridiculed. This spirit was exhibited especially among those whose habits of thought were most secular, and whose minds were least governed by authority."

But the belief did not become extinguished immediately. In France, in 1850, the Civil Tribunal of Chartres tried a man and woman named Soubervie for having caused the death of a woman called Bedouret. They believed she was a witch, and declared that the priest had told them she was the cause of an illness under which the woman Soubervie was suffering. They accordingly drew Bedouret into a private room, held her down upon some burning straw, and placed a red-hot iron across her