This view was also of advantage to the Church, for it increased the horror of heresy and facilitated its suppression. The laity had never entirely reconciled themselves to the sight of their apparently harmless neighbours being tortured and burnt for differences in abstract belief, but almost every one was ready to torture and burn a sorcerer, and local outbreaks of witch-hunting were frequently started by mob violence. In 1555 it was declared by the Peace of Augsburg that no one should suffer in life and property for his religion; but to take a Lutheran, call him a sorcerer, confiscate his goods, and force him by torture to confess that he was led into his errors by the devil himself, seems to have been too great a temptation for the prince-bishops who headed the ‘counter-reformation’ in South Germany to resist. That this was partly the cause of the great witch-burnings in the bishoprics of Würzburg, Bamberg, Fulda, and Trèves is evidenced by the large proportion of male victims, and by the frequent and significant appearance of the phrase ‘is also Lutheran’ in the official reports. As soon as the Reformation was established, Protestants vied with Catholics as witch-hunters. Eager to show that they were in no way inferior to their opponents in zeal for the Lord and enmity against Satan and his servants, they had the advantage of being able to follow the scriptural injunction, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, without previously explaining away ancient canons and decrees of Church synods which seemed to throw doubt on the very existence of the more typical forms of witchcraft. Nor did they hesitate to attack their rivals with similar weapons. If Protestants were burnt as sorcerers at Würzburg, we find the first Danish Lutheran bishop, Peter Palladius, recommending the zealous members of his flock to seek out the so-called wise women of their neighbourhoods on pretence of having some disease. If then the latter use paternosters, holy water, or invocations of saints, they are probably not only Catholics but witches, and should be treated accordingly.[277] Almost all the victims of the witch mania were executed on their own confession, extorted in the vast majority of instances by torture or the fear of torture. In England, where torture was theoretically illegal, confessions were comparatively rare, and nearly all died protesting their innocence. The few exceptions prove the rule; thus Elinor Shaw and Mary Philips, almost the last witches legally executed in England, 1705, confessed because they were threatened with death if they refused, and promised release if they pleaded guilty,[278] while others were induced to admit their guilt by being kept awake several nights, and forced to run up and down their cells till utterly exhausted, methods almost as effectual in producing ‘a readiness to confess’ as the rack or the thumb-screw.[279]