It was a similar return to reason which at last led in Europe also to a reaction. The Doge of Venice and the Great Council appealed to the pope, Leo X., to put a curb upon the intemperate zeal of his ministers, and he saw himself forced to check the merciless persecution. Occasionally voices had been raised, already before that public appeal, condemning such wholesale slaughter; among these were men like Bacon of Verulam, Reginald Scotus, and, marvel of marvels, two famous Jesuits, Tanner and Spee. And yet even these merciful and enlightened men never, for a moment, doubted the genuineness of witchcraft and its fatal effects. Father Spee, a most learned man, writing against the ceaseless persecutions of pretended witches, nevertheless declared, in 1631, in his renowned _Cautio criminalis_, by far the best work written on that side of the question, that "there are in the world some few wizards and enchanters, which could not be denied by any body without frivolity and great ignorance," and even Bayle, while condemning the cruelty of witches' trials, seriously proposes to punish witches for their "ill-will." Vaudé, the well-known librarian of Cardinal Mazarin, wrote an able work as an apology of all the great men who had been suspected of witchcraft, including even Clemens V., Sylvester II., and other popes, and a renowned Capuchin monk, d'Autun, pursued the same subject with infinite subtlety of thought and great happiness of diction in his _L'incrédulité savante et la crédulité ignorante_. A witch was, however, still condemned to be burned in 1698, in Germany; fortunately the judge, a distinguished jurist of the University of Halle, was remonstrated with by an esteemed colleague, and thus induced to examine himself as well as the whole grievous subject with unsparing candor. This led him to see clearly the error involved in trials of witchcraft, and he wrote, in 1701, a most valuable and influential work against the Crime of Magic. He succeeded, especially, in destroying the enormous prestige heretofore enjoyed by Del Rio's great work _Disquisitiones magicæ_, the favorite hand-book of judges of all lands, which was even adopted, though from the pen of a Jesuit, by the Protestants of Germany. In no case, however, were the personal existence of the Devil, and his activity upon earth, denied by these writers; on the contrary, it is well known that Luther, Melanchthon, and even Calvin, continued always to speak of Satan as having a corporeal existence and as being perceptible to human senses. The negation contended for applied only to his direct agency in the physical world; his moral influence was ever readily admitted. Sporadic cases of witchcraft, and their trial by high courts of justice, have continued to occur down to our day. Maria Theresa was the first peremptorily to forbid any further persecutions on account of _Veneficium_, as it had become the fashion to call the acts of magic by which men or beasts were said to be injured.