426 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. dismiss malignant spirits at will, and that it is much simpler to pray directly to God because demons can influence human affairs only through God's permission. Even Bacon, however, in asserting the uselessness of charms and spells, gives as his reason that their ef- ficacy depended on their being made under certain aspects of the heavens, the determination of which was very difficult and uncer- tain. Bacon's partial incredulity only indicates the universality of the belief in less scientific minds, and, in view of the activity as- signed to Satan in seeking human agents and servitors, and the ease with which men could evoke him and bind themselves to him, the supineness of t the Church with regard to such offences is re- markable. The terrible excitement aroused by the persecution of the Stedingers and of Conrad of Marburg's Luciferans must indu- bitably have given a stimulus to the belief in demonic agencies. Thomas of Cantimpre tells us that he had from Conrad, the Do- minican provincial, as happening to one of Conrad of Marburg's Luciferans, the well-known story that the heretic, endeavoring to convert a friar, conducted him to a vast palace where the Virgin sat enthroned in ineffable splendor surrounded by innumerable saints ; but the friar, who had provided himself with a pyx contain- ing a consecrated host, presented it to the Virgin with a demand that she should adore her Son, when the whole array vanished in darkness. Yet this excitement left behind it a reaction which rather created indisposition to further persecution. Pierre de Col- mieu, afterwards Cardinal of Albano, when Archbishop of Eouen, in 1235, included invoking and sacrificing to demons and the use of the sacraments in sorcery only among the cases reserved to the bishops for granting absolution ; and the cursory allusion to the subject by Bishop Durand in his Speculum Juris shows that, for at least a half-century later, the subject attracted little attention in the ecclesiastical courts. A synod of Anjou, in 1294, declares that according to the canons priests should expel from their parishes all diviners, soothsayers, sorcerers, and the like, and laments that they w T ere permitted to increase and multiply without hindrance, to remedy which all who know of such persons are ordered to re- port them to the episcopal court, in order that their horrible malig- nity may be restrained.*
- Rogeri Bacon Epist. de Secretis Operibus Artis c. i., ii. (M. R. Series, pp
