The charges which had been brought by heathens against early Christians were now, under altered circumstances, launched by Christians against heretics and witches. The hideous description of Christianity given by Cœcilius, in Minutius Felix, as a secret and desperate faction leagued against God and man, and celebrating the foulest nocturnal rites, became the type of accusations levelled by orthodox Christians against their dissenting brethren; and, as the charge of Cœcilius was justified by the conduct of a portion of the Christian converts, so was the charge of the orthodox against the schismatics in mediæval times justified by the conduct of some of them. The Cathari, Manichæans, Paulicians, Patarines, Albigenses, were all heretics so far that they reverted to heathenism, and to its most simple form of Schamanism, and some of the congregations sank into the grossest immorality. The writers on witchcraft who theoretically worked out its criminal details--Eumericus, Nider, Bernhard of Como, and Jacquier--spoke of it as “Secta et hæresis maleficorum,” it was a heresy, one of the several forms in which lapse from the faith took. Balduinus identified Waldenses with witches. In 1484, James Sprenger and Henry Justitor, appointed inquisitors for Upper Germany, obtained the celebrated bull of Innocent VIII., which, though far from being the origin of witch prosecutions, acted with signal effect in promoting their subsequent activity. Sprenger followed it up with his well-known treatise called “Malleus Maleficarum,” as a guide to judicial theory and practice. No object is gained by dwelling on the details of an epidemic which, for three centuries, devastated Europe, destroying so many lives. Yet two particulars challenge inquiry and remark: one, the strange uniformity of the offence as elicited by confession; the other, the curious analogy which is found to exist between the rites practised by the witches at their gatherings and those of the heretics of earlier times, Pagan and semi-Christian. The uniformity in the confession of the witches has excited surprise, and has been variously accounted for--some supposing that there must have been an external reality in the way of profane imposture, a remnant of heathen practice; others referring it to morbid subjectivity in the accused, caused by melancholy and hypochondria. That there was some objective reality, I can hardly doubt; not only are the confessions of those accused curiously alike in their account of the ceremonies of the Sabbath, when they assembled, but we know that human nature is always the same, and it is inconceivable that there should have been a cessation at any period of those gatherings of men and women who found the only satisfaction for their religious cravings in vague spiritualism.