The judge should therefore use the following formula: “We ordain that the torture shall be continued (not repeated) to-morrow.”
The second day the instruments of torture are to be exhibited to the accused, and an attending priest shall read the following adjuration: “I adjure thee, N. N., in the name of the Holy Trinity, by the bitter tears of Jesus Christ which he shed upon the cross ... by the tears of God’s saints and elect which they have shed over the world ... that, if thou art innocent, thou pour forth immediately abundant tears; but, if thou art guilty, no tears at all. In the name of God our Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
The person thus adjured seldom weeps. But if this should occur, the judge should see that it be not saliva or some other fluid that moistens the eye of the witch. The witch must be led into the court-room backwards, that the judge may see her before she sees him. Otherwise she may enchant him and move him to criminal compassion.
Before the examination of witnesses, the accused must be stripped of all her clothing and have all the hair on her body shaved off, and her limbs must be carefully examined to ascertain if they bear marks, for the devil marks his own. It must be further ascertained by pricking with a needle if any part of the body is devoid of feeling, for that is a sure sign of a witch. Still the absence of such a sign nowise proves innocence.
If the witch can not be made to confess by any means, then the judge must send her to a distant prison. The janitor, some friend and chaste women are to be persuaded to visit the prisoner, and promise to help her to escape, if she will only inform them of some of her arts. In this way, remarks the author of the “Witch-hammer,” many a one has been ensnared by us.
We conclude here our account of Sprenger’s dreadful book. The reader has contemplated sufficiently this fruit on the tree of the devil.—It may fill us with loathing to consider it, but its teachings are instructive. May we know the tree from the fruit, and may we tear it up with its roots—with those roots yet so abundantly watered by men who know not what they are doing. The fires which the bull of Pope Innocent kindled all over Europe, threw their weird light far into the times which have been called the modern,—far in the eighteenth century. To count these victims of the stake would be impossible. It is, however, sometimes attempted in our days; archives are searched through and discoveries are made which surpass every anticipation. The victims amount to millions.
No age was spared. Children were brought to the stake with their mothers. A silent, gloomy presentiment seized every community when the proclamation on the church doors announced that the inquisitor had arrived. All work in the shops and fields ceased, and all the evil passions flared up into greater activity. He who had an open enemy, or suspected secret envy, knew beforehand that he was lost. It was considered better to anticipate than to be anticipated in denouncing; and the tribunal had hardly commenced its activity, ere it was overcrowded with informers. “When they had commenced in one place to burn witches,” says an author of the seventeenth century, “more were found in proportion as they were burned.” In various communities in Germany and France all the women were sent to the stake. In many instances it went so far that princes and potentates were forced, from fear of seeing their subjects exterminated, to stay by authoritative command the madness of the inquisitors. Greed brought fuel to the flames which superstition and hatred kindled. We will quote but one example from the history of the Scotch witch-processes. A man named Hopkins who was sent to the gallows, convicted of murder, confessed there that he had brought two hundred women to the stake, and for a recompense of twenty shillings each,—a sum with which the judge rewarded him.
And there was heard in all Europe for many centuries not a single voice raised in the effort to stay the murder with weapons of reason or religion! If there was any who did not share the madness of his time, fear paralyzed his tongue, and learning and religion, far from impeding the evil, had yoked themselves to its triumphal ear. With the Bible in their hands, the theologians sanctioned these barbarous proceedings, and the learned defended them with reasons drawn from the fathers and with subtle argumentation. The Protestant theologians vied with the Catholic in learning. Even Luther and the first reformers did not check, but promoted, the belief in devils. If paganism had been described by the fathers as Satan’s work and empire, Luther referred the preceding life of the Church from the beginning of papacy to the same sphere, and changed the whole history of humankind to a diabolical drama. The struggle between the Reformation and Catholicism contributed in still another way to intensify the faith in devils. The religious contest stirred the mind of the age in its innermost depths. Many who occupied middle ground between the reforming preacher on the one hand and the Catholic priest on the other, were hesitating between the old and the new, and many consciences which had already embraced the new were agitated by uneasiness and doubt. The Catholic divine saw in these doubts the beginning of the victory over Satanic error; the Protestant theologian declared the same doubts to be inspired by the originator of papacy, the devil. We can appreciate this state of things by reading Luther’s “Tischreden.” Men terrified, for instance, by a dream or a strange noise in the night (nothing more than this was required for such an effect) hurried to their pastor to lay their troubles before him. They were then informed, on the one hand, that the dream or the voice was caused by the devil, to whom their apostacy had bound them over, or, on the other, that Satan was trying to frighten them back into the errors which they had abandoned. In both cases the archfiend was the agent. “He was in the castle of the knight, the palaces of the mighty, the libraries of the learned, on every page of the Bible, in the churches, in the halls of justice, in the lawyer’s chambers, in the laboratories of physicians and naturalists, in cottages, farmyards, stalls,—everywhere.”[50]
He was indeed everywhere, and Christendom had become a hell. “The belief in the devil,” says a British author,[51] speaking upon this subject, “had had the effect, that all rational knowledge had disappeared, that all sound philosophy was denounced, that the morality of the people was poisoned and humanity sunk in a whirlpool of folly, godlessness and brutality. All classes were carried away by this whirlpool. The God of nature and Revelation had no longer the reins of the world in his hand. The powers of hell and darkness, born of a diseased imagination, reigned upon the earth.”