WITCHCRAFT IN BAVARIA. 41 



begun to doubt the reality of witchcraft until about a dozen years 

 before. The popular prejudice which he thought it now high 

 time to eradicate was the tendency to ascribe to the agency of 

 witches " all injuries, diseases, and bodily infirmities which neither 

 the doctor, nor the smith, nor the headsman may be able to recog- 

 nize or to cure." * As regards the production of storms by sor- 

 ceresses, he asks : " Can we reconcile it with the infinite goodness 

 and wisdom of God that he should permit the course of Nature to 

 be disturbed in order that an old woman may revenge herself on 

 her neighbor? " The tales of transportation through the air on 

 broomsticks, tongs, forks, and other domestic utensils transformed 

 into fiery steeds, he dismissed as " the ridiculous gossip of old crones 

 over their washtubs." But if witchcraft be a delusion, why did a 

 kind and just Providence permit thousands of persons to be, on this 

 account, cruelly tortured and put to death? In order to escape this 

 dilemma, Sterzinger replies: "Do not those deserve death who 

 blaspheme God, invoke and worship the devil, kill innocent chil- 

 dren, and exhume corpses for the purpose of injuring their neigh- 

 bors? " This question assumes the truth of the accusations usually 

 brought against supposed witches, and proves that Sterzinger had 

 not freed his mind from many of the absurdest prejudices of his 

 time. The chief significance of his discourse consisted in the fact 

 that it was delivered by an ecclesiastic before the Bavarian Academy 

 of Sciences under the auspices of a sovereign whose immediate 

 predecessors had been fanatical witch persecutors. It is a curious 

 circumstance, showing how slight was the intellectual intercourse 

 then between Catholic and Protestant Germany, that Sterzinger 

 makes no allusion to Christian Thomasius, of Halle, who had still 

 more effectually exposed the folly of the belief in witchcraft more 

 than sixty years before. Sterzinger's standpoint is sufficiently char- 

 acterized by the paragraph in his discussion of " Apparitions " {Ge- 

 spenstererscheinungen), where he asserts that " to deny the devil 

 is unbelief; to ascribe to him too little power is heresy; but to con- 

 cede to him too great power is superstition." But once admitting 

 diabolical agency as an actual and efficient factor in human affairs, 

 it is impossible to draw a line at which the influence of Satan ceases, 

 and credulity finds no stopping place until it reaches the misty 

 plateau of the Blocksberg, or joins in the disgusting orgies of the 

 sabbat. 



Nevertheless, the discourse, with all its lack of logical force and 



* This mention of "Arzt, Sclinued oder Freimann " as regular practitioners of tlie heal- 

 ing art would indicate that medicine, at least, was not one of the sciences which had reached 

 the highest point at that time. The use of the word " Freimann " for executioner seems to 

 have been confined to Muuich. 



