that gazed up to heaven in ecstacy through the sacred grove and read
the will of the Gods when the mystic tablets and rune-carved lots
were cast--all these, if the will were bad, if the soothsayer passed
into the false prophetess, the leech into a poisoner, and the
priestess into a witch, were as potent and terrible for ill as they
had once been powerful for good. In all the Indo-European tribes,
therefore, women, and especially old women, have practised witchcraft
from the earliest times, and Christianity found them wherever it
advanced. But Christianity, as it placed mankind upon a higher
platform of civilization, increased the evil which it found, and when
it expelled the ancient goddesses, and confounded them as demons with
Diana and Herodias, it added them and their votaries to the old class
of malevolent sorcerers. There was but one step, but a simple act of
the will, between the Norn and the hag, even before Christianity came
in. As soon as it came, down went Goddess, Valkyrie, Norn, priestess,
and soothsayer, into that unholy deep where the heathen hags and
witches had their being; and, as Christianity gathered strength,
developed its dogmas, and worked out its faith; fancy, tradition,
leechcraft, poverty, and idleness, produced that unhappy class, the
medieval witch, the persecution of which is one of the darkest pages
in religious history.

It is curious indeed to trace the belief in witches through the
Middle Age, and to mark how it increases in intensity and absurdity.
At first, as we have seen in the passages quoted, the superstition
seemed comparatively harmless, and though the witches themselves may
have believed in their unholy power, there were not wanting divines
who took a common-sense view of the matter, and put the absurdity of
their pretensions to a practical proof. Such was that good parish
priest who asked, when an old woman of his flock insisted that she