I am well aware that there are a few distinguished names that are always entered on the other side of the account, and some of them we must now consider. It would be unpardonable to detract in any manner from the dear-bought fame of such forerunners of a better dispensation. But we must not forget that they were forerunners. They occupy a much more conspicuous place in modern books than they occupied in the minds of their contemporaries.[43] Further, if we listen closely to the words of these voices in the wilderness, we shall find that they do not sound in unison, and that then testimony is not in all cases precisely what we should infer from the loose statements often made about them. Johann Wier, or Weyer (1515-1588), deserves all the honor he has ever received. He devoted years to the study of demonology, and brought his great learning, and his vast experience as a physician, to bear on the elucidation of the whole matter.[44] He held that many of the performances generally ascribed to devils and witches were impossible, and that the witches themselves were deluded. But there is another side to the picture. Wier’s book is crammed full of what we should now-a-days regard as the grossest superstition. He credited Satan and his attendant demons with extensive powers. He believed that the fits of the so-called bewitched persons were due in large part to demoniacal possession or obsession, and that the witches themselves, though innocent of what was alleged against them, were in many cases under the influence of the devil, who made them think that they had entered into infernal compacts, and ridden through the air on broomsticks, and killed their neighbors’ pigs, and caused disease or death by occult means. And further, he was convinced that such persons as Faust, whom he called _magi_, were acquainted with strange and damnable arts, and that they were worthy of death and their books of the fire. One example may serve to show the world-wide difference between Wier’s mental attitude and our own. One of the best known symptoms of bewitchment was the vomiting of bones, nails, needles, balls of wool, bunches of hair, and other things, some of which were so large that they could not have passed through the throat by any natural means.[45] Such phenomena, Wier tells us, he had himself seen. How were they to be explained? Easily, according to Wier’s general theory. Such articles, he says, are put into the patient’s mouth by the devil; one after another, as fast as they come out. We cannot see him do this,--either because he acts so rapidly that his motions are invisible, or because he fascinates our sight, or because he darkens our eyes, perhaps by interposing between them and the patient some aërial body.[46]