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Let them contrast Rothar's law about the impossibility of witchcraft, with the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum, Nider's Fornicarium, or Delrio the Jesuit, and see for themselves who were the false teachers.
The great resemblance between the confessions of the unhappy victims was regarded as a new proof of the existence of the crime. But this is not astonishing. The same questions from the "Malleus Maleficarum," were put to them all, and torture never failed to educe the answer required by the inquisitor.
For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the "Malleus Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and most fairly. But, fear of the unknown?
Sprenger, in Germany, was the most celebrated of these national scourges. In his notorious work, the "Malleus Maleficarum," he laid down a regular form of trial, and appointed a course of examination by which the inquisitors in other countries might best discover the guilty. The questions, which were always enforced by torture, were of the most absurd and disgusting nature.
The same incongruity appears also in Innocent VIII., whose bull against witchcraft systematized the persecution directed against unfortunate old women and idiots. Sprenger, in the Malleus Maleficarum, mentions that in the first year after its publication forty-one witches were burned in the district of Como, while crowds of suspected women took refuge in the province of the Archduke Sigismond. Cp.
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