Bodin was unquestionably the most original political philosopher who had arisen since Machiavelli, and he devoted all his learning and acuteness to crushing the rising scepticism on the subject of witches. The truth is that in those ages ability was no guarantee against error; for the single employment of the reason was to develop and expand premises that were furnished by the Church. And this statement is as valid today as it was three hundred years ago. Bodin was esteemed, by many of his contemporaries, the ablest man who had then arisen in France, and the verdict has been but little qualified by later writers. Amid all the distractions of a dissipated and an intriguing court, and all the labors of a judicial position, he had amassed an amount of learning so vast and so various as to place him in the very first rank of the scholars of his nation. He has also the greater merit of being one of the chief founders of political philosophy and political history, and of having anticipated on these subjects many of the conclusions of our own day. In his judicial capacity he had presided at some trials of witchcraft. He had brought all the resources of his scholarship to bear upon the subject, and he had written a great part of his "Demonomanie des Sorciers" before the appearance of the last work of Wier. John Wier was a physician of Cleves who had in 1563 published a work which he called, "De Praestigus Daemonum." He was quite convinced that the world was peopled by crowds of demons, who were constantly working miracles among mankind; and his only object was to reconcile his sense of their ubiquity with his persuasion that some of the phenomena that were deemed supernatural arose from disease. "Wier," said Bodin, "had armed himself against God. His book was a tissue of 'horrible blasphemies.' For the word of God is very certain that he who suffers a man worthy of death to escape, draws the punishment upon himself, as the prophet said to King Ahab, that he would die for having pardoned a man worthy of death. For no one had ever heard of pardon accorded to sorcerers." Such were the opinions which were promulgated towards the close of the sixteenth century by one of the most advanced intellects of one of the leading nations of Europe at that time; promulgated, too, with a tone of confidence and of triumph that shows how fully the writer could count upon the religious sympathies of his readers: the "Demonomanie des Sorciers" appeared in 1581. With a man of the caliber of Bodin writing the above, it is not to be wondered at that the mobs were so active in the "Witch Hunt." For as Lecky cites, "Although the illiterate cannot follow the more intricate speculations of their teachers, they can catch the general tone and character of thought which these speculations produce, and they readily apply them to their own sphere of thought."