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mined the structure of the state compelled their Catholic Majesties Isabella and Ferdinand to adopt measures of defense in which political ends and spiritual means, political means and spiritual ends, were in- extricably interwoven. The great historical success achieved by this blunder was the temple-like structure of a state which was so firm that it had no appeal and so strong that it virtually turned to stone. From out of this Spain, which knew how to maintain its national independ- ence when it signed a Concordat with Sixtus in 1482, there would go out later on an impulse salutary to the whole tottering Church.
A meaning of comparable depth is not to be discerned in the other European scandal of this period of intellectual renaissance. The de- plorable figure of Innocent VIII (14841492), a Genoese who owed his tiara to Julius Rovere who dominated him, began his reign by is- suing the fateful bull against witchcraft. The great prelates of the Carolingian Empire, and even the Church laws of the "dark" tenth century, had condemned as heretical the belief in witchcraft and magic which was a legacy from old Nordic and other Germanic peoples. One ruling had declared that whosoever believed these things to be true had lost his faith that he was doubtless an unbeliever, and even more degraded than a heathen. The experience that if faith is shown out the door superstition comes in through the window, was also borne out by the sunlight of the Renaissance. Everyone knows how the old German mania of witchcraft, encouraged by Luther, soon spread anew through the Protestant countries. Against the opposi- tion of those who fought against the rabid scare the noble Jesuit Count Spe and Thomasius, the rationalist Lutheran theologians thundered, and said that now atheism was bursting in upon evangeli- cal Zion. During the century which gave birth to Galileo and Lieb- nitz, countless women's bodies shrivelled up at the stake in all parts of Northern Europe. Not even the hatred entertained by the Lutheran camp for the Pope and all things Catholic, a hatred which was even to repudiate Gregory Ill's reform of the calendar on the ground that it emanated from Rome, could overcome a passionate dedication to the spirit of the "Witchhammer." This Dominican catechism of the particular madness of the time said, in opposition to the early Middle Ages and also to Gregory VII who had suppressed the persecution of witches in Denmark, that it was a great heresy not to believe in
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