42 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consistency, produced an immense sensation and led to a fierce con- 

 troversy, in whicli some of his academical colleagues took part as 

 the zealous defenders of witchcraft, appealing to Holy Writ, 

 Thomas Aquinas, the bulls of the popes, and canon law as their 

 principal authorities. One of them, an Augustine friar named P. 

 Angelus Merz, admitted that storms are due to natural causes, but 

 added that spirits have a clearer and keener insight into these causes 

 than men, and can make them operative in much shorter time than 

 would be the case in the ordinary course of iN'ature. The most char- 

 acteristic argument, however, was used by a Benedictine of the 

 Bavarian cloister of Scheiern, P. Angelus Marz.* " Our cloister," 

 he says, " can boast of having the largest piece of the true cross, 

 stained with the blood of Christ, in all Germany. So great is the 

 adoration of it and so strong is the faith in it that it has been neces- 

 sary to make little crosses of brass or silver, which are brought into 

 contact with the sacred relic and then disposed of to the worshipers." 

 He states that often as many as forty thousand of these crosses are 

 sold in a single year, and that they serve to protect their possessors 

 against lightning, thunder, and tempest, and especially to heal be- 

 witched cattle. But, he concludes, " if witchcraft is an old wives' 

 fable, a prejudice, then are we, the father friars of Scheiern, in- 

 famous cheats, liars, and jugglers." An oraiio 'pro domo of this sort 

 might be suitably delivered by a monk to his fellow-monastics, but 

 sounds strangely enough in the mouth of an academician addressing 

 his learned associates in scientific research. 



Opposition of this kind only served to enlighten the public mind, 

 and the secularization of the cloisters in Bavaria by Maximilian 

 Joseph, in 1803, destroyed the last lurking places of the witch- 

 craft delusion, of which the mendicant friars were the most per- 

 sistent promoters. This measure was followed in 1806 by the com- 

 plete abolition of judicial torture,f and on October 1, 1813, by the 

 publication of Anselm Feuerbach's new criminal code, in which 

 heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery found no place, and the secular 

 arm ceased to be the instrument of a mediaeval hierarchy for the 

 punishment of religious superstition. But a long-cherished and 

 deeply rooted delusion is not easily eradicated, and although witch- 



* Owing to the similarity of their names, the Augustine and Benedictine have been fre- 

 quently confounded, but they were two distinct persons and both prominent members of the 

 Academy of Sciences. Scheiern was originally a castle belonging to the ancestors of the 

 Wittelsbach dynasty, the present royal house of Bavaria, In 1108 it was converted into a 

 cloister, which was secularized and sold in 1803. It was bought, restored, and richly en- 

 dowed by Ludwig I, who intended to make it a place of burial for the royal family. The 

 Benedictines took formal possession of it again with great pomp in 1838. 



f Other German states anticipated Bavaria in this beneficent reform, Prussia having 

 abolished judicial torture in 1740, Baden in 1*767, Saxony in 1770, and Austria in 1776. 



