NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 465 



send them to the stake or scaffold. Under the doctrine of " excepted 

 cases," there was no limit to torture for persons accused of heresy 

 or witchcraft ; even the safeguards which the old pagan world had 

 imposed upon torture were thus thrown down, and the prisoner must 

 confess. 



The theological literature of the middle ages was thus enriched 

 with numberless statements regarding modes of Satanic influence on the 

 weather. Pathetic, indeed, are the records ; and none more so than the 

 confessions of these poor creatures, chiefly women and children, during 

 hundreds of years, as to their manner of raising hailstorms and tem- 

 pests. Such confessions, by tens of thousands, are still to be found in 

 the judicial records of Germany, and indeed of all Europe. Typical 

 among these "facts" thus revealed is one on which great stress was 

 laid during ages, and for which the world was first indebted to one of 

 these poor women. Crazed by the agony of torture, she declared that, 

 returning with a demon through the air from the witches' sabbath, 

 she was dropped upon the earth in the confusion which resulted among 

 the hellish legions when they heard the bells sounding the Ave 

 Maria. It is sad to note that, after a confession so valuable to sacred 

 science, the poor woman was condemned to the flames. This revela- 

 tion speedily ripened the belief that, whatever might be going on at 

 the witches' sabbath no matter how triumphant Satan might be at 

 the moment of sounding the consecrated bells the Satanic power was 

 paralyzed. This theory once started, proofs came in to support it, 

 during a hundred years, from the torture-chambers in all parts of 

 Europe. Throughout the later middle ages the Dominicans had been 

 the main agents in extorting and promulgating these revelations, but 

 in the centuries following the Reformation the Jesuits devoted them- 

 selves with even more keenness and vigor to the same task.* Some 

 curious questions incidentally arose. It was mooted among the ortho- 

 dox authorities whether the damage done by storms should or should 

 not be assessed upon the property of convicted witches: the theolo- 

 gians inclined decidedly to the affirmative ; the jurists, on the whole, 

 to the negative. 



But, in spite of these tortures, lightning and tempests continued, 

 and great men arose in the Church throughout Europe in every genera- 

 tion to point out new cruelties for the discovery of "weather-makers," 

 and new methods for bringing their machinations to naught. Here 

 and there, indeed, a thinker endeavored to modify or oppose this view. 

 Early in the sixteenth century Paracelsus called attention to the re- 

 verberation of cannon as explaining the rolling of thunder,f but he 

 was confronted by one of the greatest men of his time. Jean Bodin, 

 as superstitious in natural as he was rational in political science, made 



* For proofs of this, see not only the histories of witchcraft, but also the " Annuse 

 litterae " of the Jesuits themselves, passim. 



f See the citation from him in Fromond's " Meteorologica," lib. iii, c. 9. 

 vol. xxxi. 30 



