At first the Church refused its sanction to the popular tales about witches, more especially to the tale of the Sabbat and the transportation of witches through the air, often over immense distances. The canonists, Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, dismiss this as a fiction: which to believe is pagan, an error in the faith—in short heresy. But popular credence triumphed over the canonists. The reports of the activities of witches became so numerous, so determined and so circumstantial that it was wellnigh impossible to disbelieve. It became simply a question of how to reconcile well-authenticated facts with the canonists. A way out of the dilemma was discovered in the fifteenth century, at a time when the craze had almost reached its height. The witches meant by the canonists must have been a different order of being from those referred to by a later generation when they spoke of witches. It was merely a matter of nomenclature after all. Those responsible not only for guarding the purity of the faith but also for protecting the faithful from the assaults of the Evil One as delivered by witches could no longer allow their freedom of action to be curtailed, the powers of the Devil actually aggrandized by the misinterpreted ruling that belief in witches was error. Accordingly, when a certain eminent lawyer named Ponzinibio dared to maintain the accuracy of the canonists and to assert that all belief in witchcraft and sorcery was a delusion, the master of the Sacred Palace, Bartholomew de Spina, wrote a vehement and momentous reply, in which he turned the vials of a righteous indignation against Ponzinibio and called upon the Inquisition to proceed against the lawyer as himself a fautor of heretics.[202] The attitude of the Church had indeed made a complete reversal. What previously it had been heresy to assert it now became heresy to deny. The divine law was now discovered clearly to prove the existence of witches, and the Scriptures were reinforced by the civil code.[203] There no longer remained any room for doubt or equivocation.