EVIL SPIRITS. 357 



EVIL SPIRITS. 



By J. H. LONG. 



OF all the dark chapters in the history of the world none is 

 more terrible than that which deals with sorcery and demo- 

 niacal possession. To-day this belief has almost entirely disap- 

 peared in civilized lands : it lingers only in some remote hamlet 

 in "lucky and unlucky days," good and bad signs, and similar 

 harmless idiosyncrasies ; although most grown persons can re- 

 member that in their childhood certain uncanny individuals were 

 regarded as "witches," just as certain houses were said to be 

 " haunted." But, after all, the belief was only vague and nebu- 

 lous ; while now among even the children ghosts and fairies and 

 witches are regarded with profound skepticism. It is extremely 

 difficult, then, for us to grasp the idea that " for fifteen hundred 

 years it was universally believed that the Bible established in the 

 clearest manner the reality of witchcraft, and that an amount of 

 evidence so varied and so ample as to preclude every possibility 

 of doubt attested its continuance and prevalence. The clergy de- 

 nounced it with all the emphasis of authority. The legislators of 

 almost every land enacted laws for its punishment. Acute judges, 

 whose lives were spent in sifting evidence, investigated the ques- 

 tion on countless occasions, and (as a result) condemned the ac- 

 cused. Nations that were completely separated by position, by 

 interest, by character, were united on this question." More than 

 this. In the city of Treves alone seven thousand witches were 

 burned. At Toulouse, the seat of the Inquisition, four hundred 

 persons perished in one single execution. Remy, the judge of 

 Nancy, in France, boasted that he had put to death eight hun- 

 dred witches. In the little Italian district of Como one thousand 

 perished in one year. The Judge Voss of Fulda burned seven 

 hundred, and said that he hoped to make it one thousand. Bene- 

 dict Karpzow boasted that he had signed twenty thousand death- 

 warrants for witchcraft. In Sweden in 1690 seventy persons were 

 condemned, and most of them burned. In Great Britain^ chiefly 

 in Scotland, in twenty years alone between three and four thou- 

 sand were put to death. The executions in Paris in a few months 

 were, a contemporary writer says, " almost infinite." Indeed, not 

 to mention imprisonment and torture — torture beyond the wildest 

 flight of modern fancy — the number of persons who perished, 

 chiefly by fire, in Christian Europe and America has been cal- 

 culated as from one million to nine million. Probably four mill- 

 ion is a correct estimate. The annals of the world may be 

 searched through and through, and nothing can be found, I be- 

 lieve, to compare in tragic interest with the chapter on witch- 



