race as well as of God, the most efficient agent of hell in its
sempiternal conflict with heaven. His destruction, by any method, was
therefore the plainest duty of man.

"This was the perfected theory of sorcery and witchcraft by which the
gentle superstitions inherited and adopted from all sides were fitted
into the Christian dispensation and formed part of its accepted creed."
(_History of Inquisition in the Middle Ages_, 3, 385, LEA.)

Once the widespread superstition became adapted to the forms of
religious faith and discipline, and "the prince of the power of the air"
was clothed with new energies, the Devil was taken broader account of by
Christianity itself; the sorcery of the ancients was embodied in the
Christian conception of witchcraft; and the church undertook to deal
with it as a heresy; the door was opened wide to the sweep of the
epidemic in some of the continental lands.

In Bamburg and Wurzburg, Geneva and Como, Toulouse and Lorraine, and in
many other places in Italy, Germany, and France, thousands were
sacrificed in the names of religion, justice, and law, with bigotry for
their advocate, ignorance for their judge, and fanaticism for their
executioner. The storm of demonism raged through three centuries, and
was stayed only by the mighty barriers of protest, of inquiry, of
remonstrance, and the forces that crystallize and mold public opinion,
which guides the destinies of men in their march to a higher
civilization.

The flames burning so long and so fiercely on the continent at first
spread slowly in England and Scotland. Sorcery in some of its guises had
obtained therein ever since the Conquest, and victims had been burned