several respects, the most notable being its publicity, public opinion being deliberately called into play, the fathers and mothers of the children, who had been spirited away into the monster’s castle, being allowed to let loose their clamourings against the villain.[199] Action was taken in a civil court contemporaneously with the ecclesiastical proceedings before bishop and inquisitors. In the ecclesiastical court he was found guilty on both counts—first, unnatural lust and sacrilege; second, heresy and the invocation of demons; but his death-sentence was pronounced in the civil court. The extraordinary man underwent the final penalty with a contrition, an assurance of salvation and an enthusiasm for God which must have been strangely edifying.[200] (ii) _Witchcraft_ The great witchcraft craze did not seize upon Europe until the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is true that for hundreds of years before this crimes, which became associated with the name of witchcraft, had been known and punished, but until the twelfth century we do not find the precise well-defined conception of the witch as a woman who has entered into an unholy compact with Satan, is in possession of certain miraculous powers and in particular that of transporting herself through the air to the so-called Sabbath, or rather Sabbat, where she and her kind meet together to renew their allegiance to the Prince of Darkness. It is very likely that the idea of the omnipresence of the powerful and maleficent force of Satan took greater hold of western Europe than ever before in the twelfth century, that marvellous period of the earlier Renaissance, when men’s minds were quickened to a new realization of the splendour and beauty of things of the earth, when heresy took a firm root, and doubt and hesitation sometimes usurped the place of a faith which had been childlike and unquestioning, a period of clashing between intellectual aspiration and the inflexibility of dogma, such that the timid and the ignorant were assailed by a vivid consciousness of the dangers pressing around the Ark of the Lord upon every side, of the sinister might of the dark powers arrayed against the Redeemer. In such circumstances more insistent, more clearly defined became the conception of those evil beings going about in the world, who had sold themselves to the Devil and were assisting him in his fell purposes.[201]