The culmination of sorcery was witchcraft and yet it was not the same. In it there is no longer talk of pact with the demon, express or tacit, to obtain certain results, with the expectation of washing out the sin in the confessional and thus cheating the devil. The witch has abandoned Christianity, has renounced her baptism, has worshipped Satan as her God, has surrendered herself to him, body and soul, and exists only to be his instrument in working the evil to her fellow-creatures, which he cannot accomplish without a human agent. That such a being should excite universal detestation was inevitable, and that no effort should be spared for her extermination was the plainest duty of legislator and judge. There are no pages of European history more filled with horror than those which record the witch-madness of three centuries, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth. No land was more exposed to the contagion of this insanity than Spain where, for more than a hundred years, it was constantly threatening to break forth. That it was repressed and rendered comparatively harmless was due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition. [Sidenote: _THE SABBAT_] This witch-madness was essentially a disease of the imagination, created and stimulated by the persecution of witchcraft. Whereever the inquisitor or civil magistrate went to destroy it by fire, a harvest of witches sprang up around his footsteps. If some old crone repaid ill-treatment with a curse, and the cow of the offender chanced to die or his child to fall sick, she was marked as a witch; the judge had no difficulty in compelling such confession as he desired and in obtaining a goodly list of accomplices; everyone who had met with ill-luck hurried forward with his suspicions and accusations. Every prosecution widened the circle, until nearly the whole population might become involved, to be followed by executions numbered, not by the score but by the hundred, in blind obedience to the scriptural injunction "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." All destructive elemental disturbances--droughts or flood, tempests or hail-storms, famine or pestilence--were ascribed to witchcraft, and victims were sought, as though to offer propitiatory holocausts to the infernal gods or expiatory sacrifices to the Creator.