3 56 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and, although Luther was extremely fond of children, yet he ad- 

 vised with great earnestness the family of a boy to throw him into 

 the river because he was possessed with a devil. 



And thus, by Protestants as well as by Romanists, witches were 

 tortured and put to death in numbers so vast as to seem to us now 

 utterly incredible, the total number of persons who suffered death 

 in Europe and America being at least four millions. In most cases 

 there was a regular judicial trial ; in many cases, however, there 

 were various processes for testing the reality of the witchcraft. 

 These methods resembled the ordeals of the olden time. A favor- 

 ite method was to throw the accused into water. Then, if she did 

 not drown, that was a sign of possession. For how could she be 

 saved except by Satan's aid ? if she did drown, that was not 

 conclusive proof of innocence, because God might have taken 

 the punishment into His own hands. However, at that stage of 

 the case, the trial did not possess any further interest to the ac- 

 cused : it was simply a question of clearing her memory. 



I have used the feminine pronouns she and her. This brings 

 up the question why it was that women were supposed to be al- 

 most always the ones who entered into this compact with Satan. 

 The answer is, not so much because of the sensibility of their 

 nervous constitution and their consequent liability to religious 

 monomania, as because, from various causes (for example, that 

 Eve tempted Adam, and that women in olden times held an in- 

 ferior position as to legal rights), women were considered as in- 

 her.ently more wicked than men. In Roman times Cato had said, 

 " If the world were only free from women, men would not be with- 

 out the converse of the gods." And Chrysostom, the great father, 

 the golden-mouthed orator, had declared woman to be " a natu- 

 ral temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fas- 

 cination." When celibacy was introduced into the Church, it was 

 regarded as the highest form of virtue, and theologians exhausted 

 all the resources of their eloquence in describing the iniquity of 

 that sex whose charms had rendered celibacy so rare. So it came 

 to pass that women were believed to be especially prone to enter 

 into compacts with the Evil One. These and hundreds of other 

 matters connected with witchcraft are to be found in the litera- 

 ture of the subject which has come down to us from those far-off 

 days. Endless discussions upon all phases and aspects of the 

 question, the volumes stand now in the great libraries of Europe 

 a monument to human credulity and superstition. All phases and 

 aspects of the question, I have said. For example, there was the 

 point whether a witch felt torture or not. The general belief 

 was that she did feel it, but not so acutely as do others, and that 

 therefore the torture ought to be more severe. Then there was an- 

 other point, that of self-confession. As all know, a confession of 



