But these formed but a small minority of the vast army of victims; and even when some real criminal was arrested or some half-insane person voluntarily ‘confessed’, she was encouraged or compelled to denounce her supposed associates, and thus often involved scores of innocent acquaintances in her own awful fate. The witch-hunters are not to be blamed for believing in witchcraft, or even for carrying out the scriptural injunction ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. It is the methods they employed, compared with which the procedure of a Jeffreys or a Caiaphas was just and merciful, which cannot be excused by any talk about the spirit of the age, which brought agony and death to many thousands of innocent men, women and little children, and which excited the fiery and righteous indignation of Dr. John Weyer. According to Pascal, men never do wrong so thoroughly and so cheerfully as when they are obeying the promptings of a false principle of conscience. To which we may add that men are never more cruel and unjust than when they are in a fright. The witch-hunters, most of them at least, were pious and conscientious men. They appeal to God, the Church, and the Bible at every step. Nicholas Remy, for instance, after torturing and burning over 800 of his fellow creatures, retired from work thinking he had done God and man good service. But one thing troubled his conscience. He had spared the lives of certain young children, and merely ordered them to be scourged naked three times round the place where their parents were burning. He is convinced that this was wrong, and that they will all grow up into witches and sorcerers. Besides, if God sent two she-bears to slay the forty and two children who mocked Elisha, of how much greater punishment are those worthy who have done despite to God, His Mother, the saints, and the Catholic religion?[286] He hopes his sinful clemency will not become a precedent--a fear which was quite unnecessary, for scores of children under twelve were burnt for witchcraft; and the one plea which even then respited the most atrocious murderess did not always avail a witch, since it was believed that her future child, if not the actual offspring of the devil, would infallibly belong to his kingdom. But the witch-hunters were urged on by fear as well as by piety, for not only did they think themselves exposed to personal attacks from the devil and his allies, but they believed there was a vast and increasing society of men and women in league with the evil one, and that the fate of the world depended on its suppression. All the machinery, therefore, which the Roman emperors had devised for their protection against treason and the Church for the suppression of heresy was brought into action against the witches, for witchcraft was the acme of treason and heresy, a _crimen laesae maiestatis divinae_.[287]