the prosecution, which had been awaited with intense and anxious interest by the people, were received with great joy, and the Bernese government ordered a full report of the proceedings to be made. The ecclesiastical anathema, however, proved to be _brutum fulmen_; nothing more came of it, says Schilling, “owing to our sins.” Another chronicler adds that God permitted the inger to remain as a plague and a punishment until the people repented of their wickedness and gave evidence of their love and gratitude to Him, namely, by giving to the Church tithes of what the insects had not destroyed. The Swiss priest in his malediction declares that the inger were not in Noah’s ark and even denies that they are animals properly speaking, stigmatizing them as living corruption, products of spontaneous generation perhaps, or more probably creations of the devil. This position was assumed in order to escape the gross impropriety and glaring incongruity of having the Church of God curse the creatures which God had made and pronounced very good, and afterwards took pains to preserve from destruction by the deluge. This difficulty, always a serious one, was, as we have seen, one of the chief points urged by the counsel for the defence in favour of his clients. Malleolus gives the following formula for banning serpents and expelling them from human habitations, inculcating incidentally the iniquity of perjury and judicial injustice: “By virtue of this ban and conjuration I command you to depart from this house and cause it to be as hateful and intolerable to you, as the man, who knowingly bears false witness or pronounces an unjust sentence, is to God.” Sometimes the exorcism was in the form of a prayer, as, for example, in that used for the purgation and disinfection of springs and water-courses: “O Lord Jesus, thou who didst bless the river Jordan and wast baptized in it and hast purified and cleansed it to the end that it might be a healing element for the redemption from sin, bless, sanctify and purify this water, so that there may be left in it nothing noxious, nothing pestiferous or contagious, nothing pernicious, but that everything in it may be pure and immaculate, in order that we may use whatever is created in it for our welfare and to thy glory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”