[102] In witchcraft (as in the sacramental mystery) it was a subject for much doubt and dispute whether there might not be simply a _spiritual_ (without a _real corporeal_) presence at the sabbath. Each one decided according to the degree of his orthodoxy. The Swiss witches, like the old Italian larvae and most of the sisterhood, display extraordinary affection for the blood of new-born unbaptized infants; and it is a great desideratum to kill them before the preventive rite has been irrevocably administered; for the bodies of unbaptized children were almost indispensable in the witches' preparations. Soon as buried their corpses are dug out of their graves and carried away to the place of assembly, where they are boiled down for the fat for making the ointments.[103] The liquid in which they are boiled is carefully preserved; and the person who tastes it is immediately initiated into all the mysteries of sorcery. A witch, judicially examined by the papal commission which compiled the 'Malleus,' gives evidence of the prevalence of this practice: 'We lie in wait for children. These are often found dead by their parents; and the simple people believe that they have themselves overlain them, or that they died from natural causes; but it is we who have destroyed them. We steal them out of the grave, and boil them with lime till all the flesh is loosed from the bones and is reduced to one mass. We make of the firm part an ointment, and fill a bottle with the fluid; and whoever drinks with due ceremonies of this belongs to our league, and is already capable of bewitching.' 'Finger of birth-strangled babe' is one of the ingredients of that widely-collected composition of the Macbeth witches. [103] A practice not entirely out of repute at the present day if we may credit a statement in the _Courrier du Havre_ (as quoted in _The Times_ newspaper, Nov. 7, 1864), that recently the corpse of an old woman was dug up for the purpose of obtaining the fat, &c., as a preventive charm against witchcraft, by a person living in the neighbourhood of Havre.