In the fifteenth
century, witches were burned by thousands, and it may well be doubted if
all paganism together was ever guilty of so many human sacrifices in the
same space of time. In the sixteenth, these holocausts were appealed to
as conclusive evidence of the reality of the crime, terror was again
aroused, the more vindictive that its sources were so vague and
intangible, and cruelty was the natural consequence. Nothing but an
abject panic, in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill to grind
out syllogisms, was altogether lost, will account for some chapters in
Bodin's _Demonomanie_. Men were surrounded by a forever-renewed
conspiracy whose ramifications they could not trace, though they might
now and then lay hold on one of its associates. Protestant and Catholic
might agree in nothing else, but they were unanimous in their dread of
this invisible enemy. If fright could turn civilized Englishmen into
savage Iroquois during the imagined negro plots of New York in 1741 and
of Jamaica in 1865, if the same invisible omnipresence of Fenianism shall
be able to work the same miracle, as it perhaps will, next year in
England itself, why need we be astonished that the blows should have
fallen upon many an innocent head when men were striking wildly in
self-defence, as they supposed, against the unindictable Powers of
Darkness, against a plot which could be carried on by human agents, but
with invisible accessories and by supernatural means? In the seventeenth
century an element was added which pretty well supplied the place of
heresy as a sharpener of hatred and an awakener of indefinable suspicion.
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