From the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the seventeenth
century the history of Europe teems with processes against witches
and sorcerers. Before the Reformation it reached its height, in the
Catholic world, with the famous bull of Innocent the Eighth in 1484,
the infamous _Malleus Maleficarum_, the first of the long list
of witch-finding books, and the zeal with which the State lent all
the terrors of the law to assist the ecclesiastical inquisitors.
Before the tribunals of those inquisitors, in the fifteenth century,
innumerable victims were arraigned on the double charge of heresy and
sorcery--for the crimes ran in couples, both being children and sworn
servants of the Devil. Would that the historian could say that with
the era of the Reformation these abominations ceased. The Roman
Hierarchy, with her bulls and inquisitors, had sown a bitter crop,
which both she and the Protestant Churches were destined to reap; but
in no part of the world were the labourers more eager and willing,
when the fields were 'black' to harvest, than in those very reformed
communities which had just shaken off the yoke of Rome, and which had
sprung in many cases from the very heretics whom she had persecuted
and burnt, accusing them at the same time, of the most malignant
sorceries. [21]

Their excuse is, that no one is before his age. The intense
personality given to the Devil in the Middle Age had possessed the
whole mind of Europe. We must take them as we find them, with their
bright fancy, their earnest faith, their stern fanaticism, their
revolting superstition, just as when we look upon a picture we know
that those brilliant hues and tones, that spirit which informs the
whole, could never be, were it not for the vulgar earths and oil out
of which the glorious work of art is mixed and made. Strangely