[13] ‘Tira via, brutta bestia,’ literally ‘fire away’—is used in all senses the same as in English. [↑]
[14] The question of night flights through the air, and more, whether in the body or out of the body, than whether they were ever effected at all, was one of the most hotly contested questions of demonographers. Tartarotti, lib. I. cap. viii. § vi., winds up a long account of the subject with the following:—‘... So divided was opinion on the subject, not only of Catholics as against heterodox, but between Catholics and Catholics, that after reading in Delrio ‘qui hæc asserunt somnia esse et ludibrio certe peccant contra reverentiam Ecclesiæ matri debitam,’ and ‘Hæc opinio (somnia hæc esse) tanquam hæretica est reprobanda;’ and in Bartolomeo Spina, ‘Negare quod diabolus possit portare homines de loco in locum est hæreticum;’ you may see in Emmanuel Rodriguez, a great theologian and canonist, ‘Peccat mortaliter qui credit veneficos aut veneficas vel striges corporaliter per aëra vehi ad diversa loca, ut illi existimant;’ while Navarro mildly says, ‘Credere quod aliquando, licet raro, dæmon aliquis de loco in locum, Deo permittente, transportet non est peccatum.’
Tartarotti supplies a long list of writers who, in the course of the sixteenth and two following centuries, took the opposite sides on this question, and quotes from Dr. John Weir, (Protestant) physician to the Duke of Cleves (In Apol. sec. iv. p. 582), that the Protestants were most numerous on the side which maintained that it was an actual and corporeal and not a mental or imaginative transaction. Cesare Cantù has likewise given an exposition of the treatment of the question in ‘Gli Eretici d’ltalia,’ discorso xxxiii., and ‘Storia Universale,’ epoca xv. cap. 14, p. 488. In note 1 he gives a list of a dozen of the most celebrated Protestant writers who upheld the actuality of the witches’ congress. [↑]
S. GIOVANNI BOCCA D’ORO.
1
St. John of the Golden Mouth was another famous penitent we had here in Rome. He had treated a number of young girls shamefully, and then killed them.
But one day the grace of God touched him, and he went out into the Campagna, to a solitary place, and there, with a wattle of rushes, he made himself a hut, and lived there doing penance far, far away from any human habitation.
One day a king, and his wife, and his sons, and his daughter all went out to hunt. They got overtaken by a storm, and separated; some hasted home in one direction, and some in another, but the daughter they could not find anywhere, and when they had searched everywhere for many days and could not find her, they gave her up for lost.