when falling under lay tribunals. It proved a source of great emolument to the Church, which was even accused of fostering it for purposes of gain. A system of "witch finders" or "witch persecutors" arose. Cardan, a famous Italian physician, said of them: "In order to obtain forfeit property, the same persons acted as accusers and judges, and invented a thousand stories as proof." Witchcraft was as a sin almost confined to woman; a wizard was rare, one writer saying: to every 100 witches, we find but one wizard. In the time of Louis XIII. this proportion was greatly increased; "to one wizard, 10,000 witches," another person declared there were 100,000 witches in France alone. Sprenger, the great Inquisitor, author of "The Witch Hammer,"[1]through whose persecutions many countries were flooded with victims, said, "Heresy of witches, not of wizards, must we call it, for these latter are of very small account." No class or condition escaped Sprenger; we read of witches of fifteen years, and two "infernally beautiful"[2]of seventeen years.
The Parliament of Toulouse burned 400 witches at one time. Four hundred women at one hour on the public square, dying the horrid death of fire, for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of those persecutors, and which grew in their imagination from a false belief in woman's extraordinary wickedness, based upon a false theory as to original sin. Not a Christian country but was full of the horrors of witch persecution and violent death. Remy, Judge of Nancy, acknowledged to having himself burnt 800 in sixteen years. Many women were driven to suicide in fear of the torture in store for them. In 1595 sixteen of those accused by Remy, destroyed themselves rather than fall into his terrible hands. Six hundred were burnt in one small bishopric in one year; 900 during the same period in another. Seven thousand lost their lives at Treves; 1,000 in the province of Como in Italy in a single year; 500 were executed at Geneva in a single month. Under the reign of Francis I. more than
- ↑ The very word femina (woman) means one wanting in faith; for fe means faith, and minus, less.—Witch Hammer. This work was printed in 18mo, an unusually small size for that period, for the convenience of carrying it in the pocket, where its assertions, they could not be called arguments, could be always within reach, especially for those traveling witch inquisitors, who proceeded from country to country, like Sprenger himself, to denounce witches. This work bore the sanction of the Pope, and was followed, even in Protestant countries, until the eighteenth century. It based its theories upon the Bible, and devoted thirty-three pages to a proof that women were especially addicted to sorcery.
- ↑ It was observed they (devils) had a peculiar attachment to women with beautiful hair, and it was an old Catholic belief that St. Paul alluded to this in that somewhat obscure passage in which he exhorts women to cover their heads because of the angels.—Sprangler.
