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12 cause of devastation, suffered death. About 1515 five hundred persons were executed at Geneva under the character of 'Protestant witches.'......Forty-eight witches were burnt at Ravensburgh within four years........In Lorraine the learned inquisitor, Remigins, boasts that he put to death nine hundred people in fifteen years. As many were banished from the country; so that whole towns were on the point of becoming desolate. In 1524 a thousand persons were put to death in one year at Como, in Italy, and about one hundred every year for several years. In the beginning of the next century the persecution of witches broke out in France with a fury which was hardly conceivable, and multitudes were burnt."

The Moors in Spain, because they were not Christian, suffered merciless persecution for witchcraft, and their school at Tobosco, devoted to the study of chemistry, medicine, mathematics, and other sciences, was banned as a seminary of magic by Christian bigotry and ignorance. The epidemic spread from the vineyards and orange groves of Spain to the wild fiords and misty mountains of Sweden. Scores of witches were burnt in the one little village of Mohra, and fifteen children were executed under the beneficent sanction of "Thus saith the Lord," and thirty-six young people were condemned to be lashed weekly at the church-doors for an entire year; for this matter of witchcraft was one in which Mother Church was learnedly and pecuniarily interested. The learned held that the executed children had been anointed by the devil with an ointment made of the scrapings of altars and the filing of church-clocks! The learned clergy also held that the witches had sons and daughters by the fiends, and that these sons and daughters incestuously produced an offspring of toads and serpents. Prayers were ordered through the churches weekly that the power of Satan might be restrained, so that thousands of old women and hundreds of young children might be exempted from perishing at the stake. It was not unusual for a child of five years to be executed because some infatuated fanatic found in his body the mark of teeth of a child of about that age; and among the Christians in America a poor dog was actually hanged for having sold himself to the devil.