other heretics and schismatics who had become obnoxious or inconvenient to the Roman hierarchy. The same policy was pursued by the inquisitors who were sent to Bavaria as the plenipotentiary emissaries of the Pope, and who found the association of heresy with sorcery the most effective weapon for the punishment and suppression of the former. In Bavaria, however, this crimination was not so available and therefore never so strongly urged as in North Germany and in the southern provinces of France, where heretical opinions were more prevalent and had obtained a stronger foothold.
There is a general tendency among recent defenders of the Romish faith to resort to all sorts of shifts and subterfuges in order to relieve their Church from any direct responsibility for witchcraft persecutions. Goethe's cynical remark that writing history is one way of disavowing the past and repudiating its errors, applies with peculiar pertinence to the efforts of these apologists to cleanse the official robes of his Holiness from such an ugly stain. Thus Johann Diefenbach, in his volume Der Hexenwahn (Mainz, 1886), says: "Catholics can look back on this sad historical picture with a quiet conscience; individuals were soiled by the delusion of their time, but the Church remained immaculate." Again, he declares it to be "absurd and ridiculous to make the Church responsible for witch trials" The ecclesiastical historian Hergenröther, of Würzburg, and Professor Kaulen, of Bonn, take the same view. The assertion made by these authorities that the Church "never invoked the arm of secular justice for the bloody punishment of sorcery" is a mere verbal quibble, worthy of Thomas Aquinas: the papal inquisitors kept themselves free from blood-guiltiness, in the literal sense of the term, by burning their victims alive or in exceptional cases by strangling them before committing them to the flames. The idea of shedding human blood was so abhorrent to these pious souls that they appeased their consciences and vindicated the claims of divine justice by roasting the witch or wizard at the stake. These falsifications of history are so palpable that it would be superfluous to expose them were it not for the brazen-faced persistence with which they are repeated. The instructions and injunctions contained in the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, issued by Pope Innocent VIII, on December 5, 1484, should alone suffice to show the speciousness of such palliative pleas. It is also a notorious fact that the chief promoters of prosecutions for witchcraft were, with rare exceptions, members of the monastic orders directly commissioned by the Pope. We need only mention the Dominican friars Institoris and Sprenger, authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (Witches' Hammer), justly characterized by Dr. Riegler as "the
