466 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sport of this scientific theory, and declared thunder to he " a flaming 

 exhalation set in motion by evil spirits, and hurled downward with a 

 great crash and a horrible smell of sulphur." * In support of this 

 view, he dwells upon the confessions of tortured witches, upon the 

 acknowledged agency of demons in the w r ill-o'-the wisp, and specially 

 upon the passage in the 104th Psalm, " Who maketh his angels spir- 

 its, his ministers a flaming fire." f 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," \ 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 be- 

 lieved 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 Univer- 

 sity of Treves, daring to express similar doubts, was seized by the In- 

 quisition, 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 rais- 

 ing of storms and the general controlling of the weather, was worthy 

 of belief ; and this book became throughout Europe a standard au- 

 thority, both among Catholics and Protestants.* Even more inflexible 

 was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his 

 manual | 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 daemones 

 cum hominibus nefaria societatis fide copulantur, foodissimum semper relinquunt sulphuris 

 odorem, quod sortilegi saepissime experiuntur et confitcntur." 



f See Bodin's " Universas Naturae 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 incantalwnibus, 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 malcficorum 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. 



J " Paamonolatrcia," first printed at Lyons in 1595. 



