or dog. They presented their bodies and souls to him, kissed him under the tail, spat upon a cross and tramped on it. The devil preached to them of evil, and sometimes parodied the holy mass. Lascivious dances followed, and the rites ended with indis criminate intercourse, obliging demons serving as incubi or succubœ, as required. At first the Church tried to prove that these nocturnal meetings were fiction, and de nounced as heretical belief in them. But the evidence of reality soon became too strong: numbers of accused confessed that they had taken part in these orgies; besides, in 1450, three most reliable men, an inquisitor, a mayor and a notary, actually beheld such an assemblage. These peeping Toms paid dearly for their curiosity. The presiding demon spied them and set his followers upon them, who so beat them that they all three died in a fortnight. Witchcraft was considered more natural to women than to men, on account of the inherent wickedness of the female heart. That well-known American divine, Cotton Mather, seems to have known exactly how the devil spread diseases and plagues throughout the world. He says: " Tis no uneasy thing for the Devil to impregnate the air about us, with such malignant salts, as meeting with the salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that fermentation and putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve all the vital tyes within us; ev'n as an Aqua fortis, made with a conjunction of nitre and vitriol, corrodes what it seizes upon. And when the Devil has raised these arsenical fumes, which become venomous quivers full of terrible arrows, how easily can he shoot the deleterious miasms into those juices or bowels of men's bodies, which will soon enflame them with a mortal fire. Hence comes such plagues." As old Burton says, "You have now heard what the devil can do of himself, and you have heard what he can perform by his in struments, who are many times worse (if it be possible) than he himself, and to satisfy
their revenge and lust cause more mischief; as Erastus thinks much harm would never have been done had he not been provoked by witches to it. He had not appeared in Samuel's shape, if the witch of Endor had left him alone, or represented those serpents in Pharaoh's presence had not the magicians urged him unto it." What rendered the power of a witch par ticularly dreadful was the deplorable fact that the Church had no remedy for the ills she so recklessly wrought. Tis trae, the sign of the cross, holy water, blessed oil, palms, candles, wax and salt, and the strict per formance of religious rites were in some sense safeguards and preventives. But when once the spell was cast the victim could find no relief on earth or in heaven, only from under the earth—from the devil—through other-witches. The Church condemned this curative sorcery; still a profitable trade in it sprang up, and many witches confined them selves to this branch of the profession, although they were as liable as their adver saries to punishment for having dealings with the devil, for it was a fact that they could only relieve a sufferer by transferring his disease to someone else, or by doing some act equally evil. However, many in the latter part of the sixteenth century be lieved that a fragment of earth from a grave, if blessed at mass, and placed on the threshold of the church door would prevent the egress of any witch that might be within; a splinter of oak from a gallows, when sprinkled with holy water and hung up in a church porch had the same effect. Fortunately the illimitable powers of the witch were limited in one direction. So soon as the hand of justice was laid upon her her hellish power vanished; some thought that it was necessarv so soon as she was arrested to put her in a basket and thus carry her to prison, for if her foot touched the earth she would slay her captors with lightning and escape. Experience proved that public functionaries who had to suppress witch craft were not subject to the influence of
