After the judicial use of the red-hot iron had at last died out, the superstition on which it was based still lingered, and men believed that God would reverse the laws of nature to accomplish a special object. About 1670 Georg Frese, a merchant of Hamburg, distinguished for piety and probity, published an account, the truth of which was vouched for by many respectable eye-witnesses, stating that a friend of his named Witzendorff, who had bound himself to a young woman by terrible oaths, and then had proved false and caused her death, fell into a despairing melancholy. He accused himself of the sin against the Holy Ghost, declared that his salvation was impossible, and refused to hope unless he could see a miracle wrought in his behalf. Frese at length asked him what miracle he required, and on his replying that he must see that fire would not burn, the intrepid consoler went to a blazing fire, picked out the burning coals and also a red-hot ring, which he brought to the sinner with uninjured hands and convinced him that he could be saved by repentance. The moral drawn from the facts by the narrator to whom we owe them, is that he who under Divine influence undertakes such ordeals will be preserved unharmed.[962] Even as we have seen that Heaven sometimes interposed to punish the guilty by a reversal of the hot-water ordeal, so the industrious belief of the Middle Ages found similar miracles in the hot-iron trial, especially when Satan or some other mysterious influence nullified the appeal to God. Early in the thirteenth century a case is related in which a peasant to revenge himself on a neighbor employed a vagabond monk to burn the house of the latter. The hot-iron ordeal was vainly employed on all suspected of the crime; the house was rebuilt, the monk again bribed, burnt it a second time, and again the ordeal proved vain. The owner again rebuilt his house, and kept in it the ordeal-iron, ready for use. The monk, tempted with fresh promises, paid him another visit, and was hospitably received as before, when seeing the piece of iron, his curiosity was aroused and he asked what it was. The host handed it to him, explaining its use, but as soon as the wretch took it, it burned him to the bone, when the other seeing in him the incendiary, seized him; he was duly tried, confessed his guilt, and was broken on the wheel.[963] A variant of this story relates how a man accused of arson offered to prove his innocence by the red-hot iron, which he carried for a long distance and then showed his hand uninjured. The ordeal-iron mysteriously vanished and could not be found, until a year afterwards, when a laborer who was mending the highway came upon it under a layer of sand. It was still glowing fiercely, and when he attempted to pick it up, it burnt him severely. The bystanders at once suspected him of the crime, and on the appropriate means being taken he was forced to confess his guilt,