NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 447 



Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed 

 by Satan, lie was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of 

 Satan into the serpent in the garden of Eden, to the transforma- 

 tion of ISTebuchadnezzar, and to the casting of the devils into the 

 swine by the founder of Christianity himself.* 



One part of this superstition most tenaciously held was the 

 belief that a human being could be changed into the form of an 

 animal. This became, indeed, a fundamental point. The most 

 dreaded of predatory animals in the middle ages were the wolves. 

 Driven from the hills and forests in the winter by hunger, they 

 not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came into the villages 

 and seized children. From time to time men and women whose 

 brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed into 

 various animals, and especially into wolves. Confessing this, and 

 often implicating others, many executions of lunatics resulted; 

 not to mention here the countless sane victims who, suspected of 

 the same impossible crime, were forced by torture into confes- 

 sion of it, and sent unpitied to the stake. The belief in such a 

 transformation pervaded all Europe, and lasted long, even in 

 Protestant countries ; probably no article in the witch creed had 

 more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth cent- 

 uries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its resultant 

 horrors. 



The Keformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the 

 doctrines of witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed 

 them still further. No one urged their fundamental ideas more 

 fully than Luther. He did, indeed, reject portions of the witch- 

 craft folly ; but to the influence of devils he not only attributed 

 his maladies but his dreams, and nearly everything that thwarted 

 or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon his book, the rats 

 which kept him awake at night, he believed to be devils; the 

 resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he attributed 

 to Satan literally working in that prelate's heart ; to his disciples 

 he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the 

 devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he 

 exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised 

 stronger remedies ; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from 

 Satanic influence, was so great that on one occasion he appears to 

 have advised the killing of an idiot child, as being the direct off- 

 spring of Satan. Yet Luther was one of the most tender and 

 loving of men ; in the whole range of literature there is hardly 

 anything more touching than his words and tributes to children. 

 In enforcing his ideas he laid stress especially upon the question 

 of St. Paul as to the bewitching of the Galatians, and, in the case 



* See Menabrea, "Proces au Moyen Age contra les Animaux," Chambery, 1846, pp. 

 31 and followiDfr. 



