sport of this scientific theory, and declared thunder to be "a flaming exhalation set in motion by evil spirits, and hurled downward with a great crash and a horrible smell of sulphur."[1] In support of this view, he dwells upon the confessions of tortured witches, upon the acknowledged agency of demons in the will-o'-the wisp, and specially upon the passage in the 104th Psalm, "Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire."[2] To resist such powerful arguments by such powerful men was dangerous indeed. In 1513, Pomponatius, professor at Padua, published a volume of "Doubts as to the Fourth Book of Aristotle's Meteorologica,"[3] and also dared to question this power of devils; but he soon found it advisable to explain that, while as a philosopher he might doubt, yet as a Christian he of course believed everything taught by Mother Church—devils and all—and so escaped the fate of several others who dared to question the agency of witches in atmospheric and other disturbances. Before the end of the sixteenth century, Cornelius Loos, professor in the University of Treves, daring to express similar doubts, was seized by the Inquisition, forced to recant, and banished. Just a century later the Protestant divine, Balthasar Bekker, in Holland, who ventured not only to question the devil's power over the weather, but to deny his bodily existence altogether, was solemnly tried by the synod of his church, and expelled from his pulpit, while his views were condemned as heresy, and overwhelmed with a flood of refutations whose mere catalogue would fill pages; and these cases were but typical of many.
The great upholders of the orthodox view retained full possession of the field. Famous among these was Bishop Binsfeld, of Treves, who, toward the end of the sixteenth century, wrote a book to prove that everything confessed by the witches under torture, especially the raising of storms and the general controlling of the weather, was worthy of belief; and this book became throughout Europe a standard authority, both among Catholics and Protestants.[4] Even more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual[5] he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.
Protestantism fell into the superstition as fully as Catholicism. In
- ↑ He adds: "Id certissimam daemonis praesentiam signifieat: nam ubicunque dæmones cum hominibus nefaria societatis fide copulantur, fœdissimum semper relinquunt sulphuris odorem, quod sortilegi sæpissime experiuntur et confitentur."
- ↑ See Bodin's "Universas Naturæ Theatrum" (Frankfort, 1597), pp. 208-211.
- ↑ The first edition of this book, which was the earliest of Pomponatius's writings, is excessively rare; but it was reprinted at Venice just a half-century later. It is in his De incantationibus, however, that he speaks especially of devils. As to Pomponatius, see Creighton's "History of the Papacy during the Reformation," and an excellent essay in Franck's "Moralistes et Philosophes."
- ↑ It bore the title of "Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum." First published at Treves in 1589, it appeared subsequently four times in the original Latin, as well as in two distinct German translations, and in a French one.
- ↑ "Dæmonolatrcia," first printed at Lyons in 1595.
