This article seems definitely intended to fix the position of the Church of England.[68] The whole question of exorcism had, in common with every other point of Christian doctrine, caused the most acrid disagreement. The Lutherans retained exorcism in the baptismal rite and were both instant and persevering in their exorcisms of the possessed. Martin Luther himself had a most vivid realization of and the firmest belief in the material antagonism of evil. The black stain in the castle of Wartburg still marks the room where he flung his ink-horn at the Devil. The silly body, the blind, the dumb, the idiot, were, as often as not, afflicted by demons; the raving maniac was assuredly possessed. Physicians might explain these evils as natural infirmity, but such physicians were ignorant men; they did not know the craft and power of Satan. Many a poor wretch who was generally supposed to have committed suicide had in truth been seized by the Fiend and strangled by him. The Devil could beget children; had not Luther himself come in contact with one of them?[69] At the close of the sixteenth century, however, an interminable and desperate struggle took place between the believers in exorcism and the Swiss and Silesian sectaries who entirely discarded exorcism,[70] either declaring it to have belonged only to the earliest years of Christianity or else trying to explain away the Biblical instances on purely rationalistic grounds. In England baptismal exorcism was retained in the First Prayer Book of 1549, but by 1552, owing to the authority of Martin Bucer, we find it entirely eliminated. Under Elizabeth the ever-increasing influence of Zurich and Geneva, to which completest deference was paid, thoroughly discredited exorcisms of any kind, and this misbelieving attitude is repeatedly and amply made clear in the sundry “Apologies” and “Defences” of Jewel and his followers. A letter of Archbishop Parker in 1574[71] with reference to the proven frauds of two idle wenches, Agnes Bridges and Rachel Pinder,[72] shows that he was thoroughly sceptical as to the possibility of possession, and his successor, the stout old Calvinist Whitgift, was certainly of the same mind.