In Italy, even in the middle of the fifteenth century St. Antonino of Florence considers it necessary, in his instructions to confessors, to tell them that a judge who prescribes the combat or the red-hot iron commits mortal sin;[1369] and Angelo da Chiavasco, who died in 1485, requires confessors to inquire of penitents whether they have ordered or accepted the hot-iron ordeal.[1370] Even as late as 1599 G. Ferretti tells us that in some districts of Naples, inhabited by Epirotes, husbands who suspect their wives of adultery force them to prove their innocence by the ordeal of red-hot iron or boiling water.[1371] Although the ordeal was thus removed from the admitted jurisprudence of Europe, the principles of faith which had given it vitality were too deeply implanted in the popular mind to be at once eradicated, and accordingly, as we have seen above, instances of its employment continued occasionally for several centuries to disgrace the tribunals. The ordeal of battle, indeed, as shown in the preceding essay, was not legally abrogated until long afterward; and the longevity of the popular belief, upon which the whole system was founded, may be gathered from a remark of Sir William Staundford, a learned judge and respectable legal authority, who, in 1557, expresses the same confident expectation of Divine interference which had animated Hincmar or Poppo. After stating that in an accusation of felony, unsupported by evidence, the defendant had a right to wager his battle, he proceeds: “Because in that the appellant demands judgment of death against the appellee, it is more reasonable that he should hazard his life with the defendant for the trial of it, than to put it on the country ... and to leave it to God, to whom all things are open, to give the verdict in such case, _scilicet_, by attributing the victory or vanquishment to the one party or the other, as it pleaseth Him.”[1372] Nearly about the same time, Ciruelo, who for thirty years was Inquisitor at Saragossa, alludes to cases in which he had personally known of its employment, thus showing that it was in popular use, even though not prescribed by the law, in Spain during the middle of the sixteenth century.[1373] In Germany not long before the learned Aventinus showed plainly that the existing incredulity which treated all such reliance on God as insanity was much less to his taste than the pious trust which through ages of faith had led princes and prelates to place their hope in God and invoke him with all the solemnities of religion to decide where human wisdom was at fault.[1374] * * * * *