A Jesuit of advanced age and ancient probity once infringed this last order and listened to a woman penitent without witnesses. Loyola called eight priests together and made the old Jesuit scourge himself on his naked back till each of the priests had repeated one of the penitential psalms.
To do all things vehemently has always been a German trait. According to Hasenmuller, a German Jesuit turned Lutheran, many of Loyola's disciples in Germany exceeded their chief in their expressed contempt for women. Some Jesuit priests, he says, expectorated whenever a woman's name was mentioned. Others would eat no dish prepared by a woman. One cried: "When I think of a woman my stomach rises and my blood is up." Another exclaimed: "It grieves me and I am ashamed that a woman brought me into the world."
The emotional element in Jesuitism appealed strongly to women. The general contempt for their sex expressed by Jesuit priests made special notice all the more valuable. No modern woman of fashion who has secured for her drawing room the first appearance of a social lion is more elated thereby than were the few queens, princesses, and women of wealth who, in the early days of the order, were honored by the notice of Jesuit priests. Add to this the fact that the Jesuits were, in general, a picked body of young, strong, handsome men of gracious manners and fascinating address, and we have the secret of their power over women. Small wonder that women worked indefatigably to advance the interests of the new order.
Allied to the Jesuits only by the smarting, chafing tie of persecution were the Jewish women. After the Thirty Years' War there were many of these in Germany. Their descendants, even when Christians, were debarred from entering the Society of Jesus. The babes of Jewish mothers were often forcibly baptized. Freytag quotes a pathetic story told in an old pamphlet written by two Jesuit fathers, Eder and Christel.
One Samuel Metzel was converted to Christianity. His wife refused to forsake her ancestral faith. Her four children were taken away from her and placed in Christian families. She was about to bring a fifth child into the world. In terror lest she should lose this one too, she hid herself in a retired spot. Her oldest little girl unconsciously betrayed the mother's hiding place. When the babe was born the father and the two priests sent a Christian midwife to baptize and kidnap it. Three "pious ladies" accompanied the midwife.
When the Jewish mother saw that the midwife baptized her newborn babe, she "sprang frantically from her bed and with vehement cries tore the infant from the woman's arms." The "pious ladies" sent for masculine help. The city judge, with armed men, entered the room and "tried to separate the now little Christian son from his mother. But as she, like a frantic one, held the child so tightly clasped in her arms, they desisted, fearing to stifle the babe, and the judicious judge contented himself with strictly forbidding the Jews in the house to try to make a Jew of the child." The Lord Count of the empire, when appealed to, decided that the child must be delivered to its father. The priestly historians add, with evident pride and satisfaction: "Not long after, the mother who had so stubbornly adhered to Judaism gave in and was baptized."
When the plague swept Germany, the Jesuits and their women coadjutors were magnificent in their self-forgetfulness and unremitting work of succor. Splendidly, too, as a rule, did they stand by one unfortunate class of women the so-called witches of the seventeenth century. It was a Jesuit priest, the noble Frederick von Spee, who, when asked by the Elector of Mainz why his hair had turned white at the early age of forty, replied: "Sire, it is because I have accompanied to the stake so many women accused of witchcraft not one of whom was guilty."
The persecution of so-called witches grew to fearful proportions in the seventeenth century. No ugly old woman who had village enemies was safe from arrest and execution on a charge of witchcraft. The following statistics from the small district of Drachenfels are typical, as in every other town of the empire similar conditions prevailed.
Between July, 1630, and December, 1631, and between November, 1643, and May, 1645, ninety-two out of the eight hundred inhabitants of the district were executed for witchcraft. Every second house furnished at least one victim. Sometimes four or five out of a single family were accused. The youngest woman burned was twenty-nine years of age. The others were between fifty-five and eighty. Confessions were secured by the use of the rack and other horrible tortures. The confessions were always similar, a mere echo of the stories told around every village hearth on winter evenings. The alleged witch had sickened cattle. She had sought at midnight the woodland dancing place of evil spirits or had ridden through the air on a broomstick. She had made a compact with the devil, etc., etc.
But confession was not considered evidence enough. Accomplices must be declared. Just here, sometimes, splendid heroism came in, as in the case of Frau Merl of Drachenfels. Neither the rack, the thumbscrew, nor ice-cold water poured over her could induce her to name as co-witch any but dead women. Through three courts they dragged her case. There was even a chance of saving her own life if she would implicate certain other suspected persons. Instead, however, she went alone to the stake. One wishes that Von Spee might have walked beside her, whispering words of consolation.