34 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



other heretics and schismatics who had become obnoxious or in- 

 convenient to the Roman hierarchy. The same policy was pursued 

 by the inquisitors who were sent to Bavaria as the plenipotentiary 

 emissaries of the Pope, and who found the association of heresy 

 with sorcery the most effective weapon for the punishment and 

 suppression of the former. In Bavaria, however, this crimination 

 was not so available and therefore never so strongly urged as in 

 North Germany and in the southern provinces of France, where 

 heretical opinions were more prevalent and had obtained a stronger 

 foothold. 



There is a general tendency among recent defenders of the 

 Komish faith to resort to all sorts of shifts and subterfuges in order 

 to relieve their Church from any direct responsibility for witch- 

 craft persecutions. Goethe's cynical remark that writing history 

 is one way of disavowing the past and repudiating its errors, applies 

 with peculiar pertinence to the efforts of these apologists to cleanse 

 the official robes of his Holiness from such an ugly stain. Thus 

 Johann Diefenbach, in his volume Der Hexenwahn (Mainz, 1886), 

 says : " Catholics can look back on this sad historical picture with a 

 quiet conscience; individuals were soiled by the delusion of their 

 time, but the Church remained immaculate." Again, he declares 

 it to be " absurd and ridiculous to make the Church responsible for 

 witch trials." The ecclesiastical historian Hergenrother, of Wlirz- 

 burg, and Professor Kaulen, of Bonn, take the same view. The asser- 

 tion made by these authorities that the Church " never invoked the 

 arm of secular justice for the bloody punishment of sorcery " is a 

 mere verbal quibble, worthy of Thomas Aquinas : the papal inquisi- 

 tors kept themselves free from blood-guiltiness, in the literal sense 

 of the term, by burning their victims alive or in exceptional cases 

 by strangling them before committing them to the flames. The 

 idea of shedding human blood was so abhorrent to these pious souls 

 that they appeased their consciences and vindicated the claims of 

 divine justice by roasting the witch or wizard at the stake. These 

 falsifications of history are so palpable that it would be superfluous 

 to expose them were it not for the brazen-faced persistence with 

 which they are repeated. The instructions and injunctions con- 

 tained in the bull Summis desiderantes affedihus, issued by Pope 

 Innocent VIII, on December 5, 1484, should alone suffice to show 

 the speciousness of such palliative pleas. It is also a notorious fact 

 that the chief promoters of prosecutions for witchcraft were, with 

 rare exceptions, members of the monastic orders directly commis- 

 sioned by the Pope. We need only mention the Dominican friars 

 Institoris and Sprenger, authors of the Malleus Maleficarum 

 (Witches' Hammer), justly characterized by Dr. Riegler as " the 



