Only one class
of diseases remained unquestionably hers--those which were still
admitted to be due to the direct personal interference of
Satan--and foremost among these was insanity.[[117b]] It was surely
no wonder that an age of religious controversy and excitement
should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the mind; and, to
men who mutually taught the utter futility of that baptismal
exorcism by which the babes of their misguided neighbours were
made to renounce the devil and his works, it ought not to have
seemed strange that his victims now became more numerous.[[117c]]
But so simple an explanation did not satisfy these physicians of
souls; they therefore devised a simpler one: their patients, they
alleged, were bewitched, and their increase was due to the
growing numbers of those human allies of Satan known as witches.
Already, before the close of the fifteenth century, Pope
innocent VIII had issued the startling bull by which he called on
the archbishops, bishops, and other clergy of Germany to join
hands with his inquisitors in rooting out these willing
bond-servants of Satan, who were said to swarm throughout all
that country and to revel in the blackest crimes.
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