The Age of the Reformation Part 51

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

The spirit of Montaigne was thoroughly tolerant, because he was always able to see both sides of everything; one might even say that he was negatively suggestible, and always saw the "other" side of an opinion better than he saw his own side of it. He never came out strongly for toleration, but he made two extremely sage remarks about it. The first was that it was setting a high value on our own conjectures to put men to death for their sake. The second was thus phrased, in the old English translation: "It might be urged that to give factions the bridle to uphold their opinion, is by that facility and ease, the ready way to mollify and release them; and to blunt the edge, which is sharpened by rareness, novelty and difficulty."

Had the course of history been decided by weight of argument, persecution would have been fastened on the world forever, for the consensus of opinion was overwhelmingly against liberty of conscience.

But just as individuals are rarely converted on any vital question by argument, so the course of races and of civilizations is decided by factors lying deeper than {649} the logic of publicists can reach.

Modern toleration developed from two very different sources; by one of which the whole point of view of the race has changed, and by the other of which a truce between warring factions, at first imposed as bitter necessity, has developed, because of its proved value, into a permanent peace.

[Sidenote: Renaissance]

The first cause of modern tolerance is the growing rationalism of which the seeds were sown by the Renaissance. The generation before Luther saw an almost unparalleled liberty in the expression of learned opinion. Valla could attack pope, Bible and Christian ethics; Pomponazzi could doubt the immortality of the soul; More could frame a Utopia of deists, and Machiavelli could treat religion as an instrument in the hands of knaves to dupe fools. As far as it went this liberty was admirable; but it was really narrow and "academic" in the worst sense of the word. The scholars who vindicated for themselves the right to say and think what they pleased in the learned tongue and in university halls, never dreamed that the people had the same rights.

Even Erasmus was always urging Luther not to communicate imprudent truths to the vulgar, and when he kept on doing so Erasmus was so vexed that he "cared not whether Luther was roasted or boiled" for it.

Erasmus's good friend Ammonius jocosely complained that heretics were so plentiful in England in 1511 before the Reformation had been heard of, that the demand for f.a.ggots to burn them was enhancing the price of fire-wood. Indeed, in this enlightened era of the Renaissance, what porridge was handed to the common people? What was free, except dentistry, to the Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal and persecuted everywhere else? What tolerance was extended to the Hussites? What mercy was shown to the Lollards or to Savonarola?

{650} [Sidenote: Reformation]

Paradoxical as it may seem to say it, after what has been said of the intolerance of the Reformers, the second cause that extended modern freedom of conscience from the privileged few to the ma.s.ses, was the Reformation. Overclouding, as it did for a few years, all the glorious culture of the Renaissance with a dark mist of fanaticism, it nevertheless proved, contrary to its own purpose, one of the two parents of liberty. What neither the common ground of the Christians in doctrine, nor their vaunted love of G.o.d, nor their enlightenment by the Spirit, could produce, was finally wrung from their mutual and bitter hatreds. Of all the fair flowers that have sprung from a dark and noisome soil, that of religious liberty sprouting from religious war has been the fairest.

The steps were gradual. First, after the long deadlock of Lutheran and Catholic, came to be worked out the principle of the toleration of the two churches, [Sidenote: 1555] embodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The Compact of Warsaw [Sidenote: 1573] granted absolute religious liberty to the n.o.bles. The people of the Netherlands, sickened with slaughter in the name of the faith, took a longer step in the direction of toleration in the Union of Utrecht. [Sidenote: 1579] The government of Elizabeth, acting from prudential motives only, created and maintained an extra-legal tolerance of Catholics, again and again refusing to molest those who were peaceable and quiet. The papists even hoped to obtain legal recognition when Francis Bacon proposed to tolerate all Christians except those who refused to fight a foreign enemy. France found herself in a like position, [Sidenote: 1592] and solved it by allowing the two religions to live side by side in the Edict of Nantes. The furious hatred of the Christians for each other blazed forth in the Thirty Years War, [Sidenote: 1598] but after that lesson persecution on a large scale was at an end. Indeed, before its end, wide religious {651} liberty had been granted in some of the American colonies, notably in Rhode Island and Maryland.

[1] Gregory XVI, Encyclical, _Mirari vos_, 1832.

[2] _Letters to Mary Gladstone_, ed. H. Paul, 1904, p. 298 f.

[3] C. Mirbt: _Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums_, 3, 1911, p. 390.

SECTION 2. WITCHCRAFT

Some a.n.a.logy to the wave of persecution and confessional war that swept over Europe at this time can be found in the witchcraft craze. Both were examples of those manias to which mankind is periodically subject. They run over the face of the earth like epidemics or as a great fire consumes a city. Beginning in a few isolated cases, so obscure as to be hard to trace, the mania gathers strength until it burns with its maximum fierceness and then, having exhausted itself, as it were, dies away, often quite suddenly. Such manias were the Children's Crusade and the zeal of the flagellants in the Middle Ages. Such have been the mad speculations as that of the South Sea Bubble and the panics that repeatedly visit our markets. To the same category belong the religious and superst.i.tious delusions of the sixteenth century.

The history of these mental epidemics is easier to trace than their causes. Certainly, reason does nothing to control them. In almost every case there are a few sane men to point out, with perfect rationality, the nature of the folly to their contemporaries, but in all cases their words fall on deaf ears. They are mocked, imprisoned, sometimes put to death for their pains, whereas any fanatical fool that adds fuel to the flame of current pa.s.sion is listened to, rewarded and followed.

[Sidenote: Ancient magic]

The original stuff from which the mania was wrought is a savage survival.

Hebrew and Roman law dealt with witchcraft. The Middle Ages saw the survival of magic, still called in Italy, "the old religion," and new superst.i.tions added to it. Something of the ancient enchantment still lies upon the {652} fairylands of Europe. In the Apennines one sometimes comes upon a grove of olives or cypresses as gnarled and twisted as the tortured souls that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins and kobolds hiding behind the roots and rocks; one can hear the King of the Willows[1] and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling in the rustling of the leaves. On a summer's day the calm of pools is so complete that it seems as if, according to Luther's words, the throwing of a stone into the water would raise a tempest. But on moonlit, windy, Walpurgis Night, witches audibly ride by, hooted at by the owls, and vast spectres dance in the cloud-banks beyond the Brocken.

[Sidenote: The witch]

The witch has become a typical figure: she was usually a simple, old woman living in a lonely cottage with a black cat, gathering herbs by the light of the moon. But she was not always an ancient beldam; some witches were known as the purest and fairest maidens of the village; some were ladies in high station; some were men. A ground for suspicion was sometimes furnished by the fact that certain charletans playing upon the credulity of the ignorant, professed to be able by sorcery to find money, "to provoke persons to love," or to consume the body and goods of a client's enemy. Black magic was occasionally resorted to to get rid {653} of personal or political enemies. More often a wise woman would be sought for her skill in herbs and her very success in making cures would sometimes be her undoing.

[Sidenote: The devil]

If the witch was a domestic article in Europe, the devil was an imported luxury from Asia. Like Aeneas and many another foreign conqueror, when he came to rule the land he married its princess--in this case Hulda the pristine G.o.ddess of love and beauty--and adopted many of the native customs. It is difficult for us to imagine what a personage the devil was in the age of the Reformation. Like all geniuses he had a large capacity for work and paid great attention to detail. Frequently he took the form of a cat or a black dog with horns to frighten children by "skipping to and fro and sitting upon the top of a nettle"; again he would obligingly hold a review of evil spirits for the satisfaction of Benvenuto Cellini's curiosity. He was at the bottom of all the earthquakes, pestilences, famines and wars of the century, and also, if we may trust their mutual recriminations, he was the special patron of the pope on the one hand and of Calvin on the other. Luther often talked with him, though in doing so the sweat poured from his brow and his heart almost stopped beating. Luther admitted that the devil always got the best of an argument and could only be banished by some unprintably nasty epithets hurled at his head. Satan and his satellites often took the form of men or women and under the name of incubi and succubi had s.e.xual intercourse with mortals. One of the most abominable features of the witch craze was that during its height hundreds of children of four or five years old confessed to being the devil's paramours.

So great was the power of Satan that, in the common belief, many persons bartered their souls to him {654} in return for supernatural gifts in this life. To compensate them for the loss of their salvation, these persons, the witches, were enabled to do acts of petty spite to their neighbors, turning milk sour, blighting crops, causing sickness to man and animals, making children cry themselves to death before baptism, rendering marriages barren, procuring abortion, and giving charms to blind a husband to his wife's adultery, or philters to compel love.

[Sidenote: Witches' Sabbath]

On certain nights the witches and devils met for the celebration of blasphemous and obscene rites in an a.s.sembly known as the Witches'

Sabbath. To enable themselves to ride to the meeting-place on broomsticks, the witches procured a communion wafer, applied a toad to it, burned it, mingled its ashes with the blood of an infant, the powdered bones of a hanged man and certain herbs. The meeting then indulged in a parody of the ma.s.s, for, so the grave doctors taught, as Christ had his sacraments the devil had his "unsacraments" or "execrements." His Satanic Majesty took the form of a goat, dog, cat or ape and received the homage of his subjects in a loathsome ceremony.

After a banquet promiscuous intercourse of devils and witches followed.

All this superst.i.tion smouldered along in the embers of folk tales for centuries until it was blown into a devastating blaze by the breath of theologians who started to try to blow it out. The first puff was given by Innocence VIII in his bull _Summis desiderantes_. [Sidenote: December 5, 1484] The Holy Father having learned with sorrow that many persons in Germany had had intercourse with demons and had by incantations hindered the birth of children and blasted the fruits of the earth, gave authority to Henry Inst.i.toris and James Sprenger to correct, incarcerate, punish and fine such persons, calling in, if need be, the aid of the secular arm. These {655} gentlemen acquitted themselves with unsurpa.s.sed zeal.

Not content with trying and punishing people brought before them, they put forth _The Witches' Hammer_, [Sidenote: _Malleus Maleficarum_, 1487]

called by Lea the most portentous monument of superst.i.tion ever produced.

In the next two centuries it was printed twenty-nine times. The University of Cologne at once decided that to doubt the reality of witchcraft was a crime. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand, having all it could do with Jews and heretics, treated witchcraft as a diabolical delusion.

[Sidenote: Inquisition]

Though most men, including those whom we consider the choice and master-spirits of the age, Erasmus and More, firmly believed in the objective reality of witchcraft, they were not obsessed by the subject, as were their immediate posterity. Two causes may be found for the intensification of the fanaticism. The first was the use of torture by the Inquisition. [Sidenote: Torture] The crime was of such a nature that it could hardly be proved save by confession, and this, in general, could be extracted only by the infliction of pain. It is instructive to note that in England where the spirit of the law was averse to torture, no progress in witch-hunting took place until a subst.i.tute for the rack had been found, first in p.r.i.c.king the body of the witch with pins to find the anaesthetic spot supposed to mark her, and secondly in depriving her of sleep.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

A second patent cause of the mania was the zeal and the bibliolatry of Protestantism. The religious debate heated the spiritual atmosphere and turned men's thoughts to the world of spirits. Such texts, continually harped upon, as that on the witch of Endor, the injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the demoniacs of the New Testament, weighed heavily upon the shepherds of the people and upon their flocks.

Of the reality of witchcraft Luther harbored not a doubt. The first use he made of the ban was to {656} excommunicate reputed witches. Seeing an idiotic child, whom he regarded as a changeling, he recommended the authorities to drown it, as a body without a soul. Repeatedly, both in private talk and in public sermons, he recommended that witches should be put to death without mercy and without regard to legal niceties. As a matter of fact, four witches were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540.

The other Protestants hastened to follow the bad example of their master.

In Geneva, under Calvin, thirty-four women were burned or quartered for the crime in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 1562 was perhaps the occasion of a new English law against witchcraft. Richard Baxter wrote on the _Certainty of a World of Spirits_. At a much later time the bad record of the Mathers is well known, as also John Wesley's remark that giving up witchcraft meant giving up the Bible.

[Sidenote: The madness]

After the mania reached its height in the closing years of the century, anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry, or a colt break its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or else a physician, baffled by some disease that did not yield to his treatment of bleeding and to his doses of garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that witchcraft was the reason for his failure. In fact, if any contrariety met the path of the ordinary man or woman, he or she immediately thought of the black art, and considered the most likely person for denunciation.

This would naturally be the nearest old woman, especially if she had a tang to her tongue and had muttered "Bad luck to you!" on some previous occasion. She would then be hauled before the court, promised liberty if she confessed, stripped and examined for some mark of Satan or to be sure that she was not hiding a charm {657} about her person. Torture in some form was then applied, and a ghastly list it was, p.r.i.c.king with needles under nails, crushing of bones until the marrow spurted out, wrenching of the head with knotted cords, toasting the feet before a fire, suspending the victim by the hands tied behind the back and letting her drop until the shoulders were disjointed. The horrible work would be kept up until the poor woman either died under the torture, or confessed, when she was sentenced without mercy, usually to be burned, sometimes to lesser punishments.

When the madness was at its height, hardly anyone, once accused, escaped.

John Bodin, a man otherwise enlightened and learned, earned himself the not unjust name of "Satan's attorney-general" by urging that strict proof could not be demanded by the very nature of these cases and that no suspected person should ever be released unless the malice of her accusers was plainer than day. Moreover, each trial bred others, for each witch denounced accomplices until almost the whole population of certain districts was suspected. So frequently did they accuse their judges or their sovereign of having a.s.sisted at the witches' sabbath, that this came to be discounted as a regular trick of the devil.

Persecution raged in some places, chiefly in Germany, like a visitation of pestilence or war. Those who tried to stop it fell victims to their own courage, and, unless they recanted, languished for years in prison, or were executed as possessed by devils themselves. At Treves the persecution was encouraged by the cupidity of the magistrates who profited by confiscation of the property of those sentenced. At Bonn schoolboys of nine or ten, fair young maidens, many priests and scores of good women were done to death.

[Sidenote: Numbers executed]

No figures have been compiled for the total number {658} of victims of this insanity. In England, under Elizabeth, before the craze had more than well started on its career, 125 persons are known to have been tried for witchcraft and 47 are known to have been executed for the crime. In Venice the Inquisition punished 199 persons for sorcery during the sixteenth century. In the year 1510, 140 witches were burned at Brescia, in 1514, 300 at Como. In a single year the bishop of Geneva burned 500 witches, the bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Wurzburg 900. About 800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Treves burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be reckoned by the tens of thousands.

Throughout the century there were not wanting some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Stra.s.sburg, [Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson wrote in his _School of Abuse_: [Sidenote: 1578] "Do not imitate those foolish patients, who, having sought all means of recovery and are never the nearer, run into witchcraft." Leonardo da Vinci called belief in necromancy the most foolish of all human delusions.

As it was dangerous to oppose the popular mood at its height, the more honor must go to the few who wrote _ex professo_ against it. The first of these, of any note, was the Protestant physician John Weyer.

[Sidenote: Weyer] In his book _De praestigiis daemonum_ [Sidenote: 1563]

he sought very cautiously to show that the poor "old, feeble-minded, {659} stay-at-home women" sentenced for witchcraft were simply the victims of their own and other people's delusions. Satan has no commerce with them save to injure their minds and corrupt their imaginations.

Quite different, he thought, were those infamous magicians who really used spells, charms, potions and the like, though even here Weyer did not admit that their effects were due to supernatural agency. This mild and cautious attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index and elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the author was a true servant of Satan.

[Sidenote: Scott]

A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the superst.i.tion was Reginald Scott's _Discovery of Witchcraft_, wherein the lewd dealings of _Witches and Witchmongers is notably defected . . . whereunto is added a realise upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils_. [Sidenote: 1584]

Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily be explained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one of staying the cruel persecution, with calculated partisanship he tried to lay the blame for it on the Catholic church. As the very existence of magic could not be disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked it on _a priori_ grounds, alleging that spirits and bodies are in two categories, unable to act directly upon each {660} other. Brilliant and convincing as the work was, it produced no corresponding effect. It was burned publicly by order of James I.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]