to believe Him to be the Creator.  The futile attempt to imitate His immaculate purity blinded their eyes to the fact that He never taught or encouraged celibacy among His followers, and this gradually led them to the strange conclusion that the passion which, sublimed and brought under control, is the source of man’s noblest and holiest feelings, was a prompting proceeding from the author of all evil.  Imbued with this idea, religious enthusiasts of both sexes immured themselves in convents; took oaths of perpetual celibacy; and even, in certain isolated cases, sought to compromise with Heaven, and baffle the tempter, by rendering a fall impossible—­forgetting that the victory over sin does not consist in immunity from temptation, but, being tempted, not to fall.  But no convent walls are so strong as to shut great nature out; and even within these sacred precincts the ascetics found that they were not free from the temptations of their arch-enemy.  In consequence of this, a belief sprang up, and spread from its original source into the outer world, in a class of devils called incubi and succubi, who roamed the earth with no other object than to tempt people to abandon their purity of life.  The cases of assault by incubi were much more frequent than those by succubi, just as women were much more affected by the dancing manias in the fifteenth century than men;[1]—­the reason, perhaps, being that they are much less capable of resisting physical privation;—­but, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, there was no generic difference between the incubus and succubus.  Here was a belief that, when the witch fury sprang up, attached itself as a matter of course as the phase of the crime; and it was an almost universal charge against the accused that they offended in this manner with their familiars, and hundreds of poor creatures suffered death upon such an indictment.  More details will be found in the authorities upon this unpleasant subject.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages, p. 136.]

[Footnote 2:  Hutchinson, p. 52.  The Witch of Edmonton, Act V. Scot, Discoverie, book iv.]

107.  This intercourse did not, as a rule, result in offspring; but this was not universally the case.  All badly deformed or monstrous children were suspected of having had such an undesirable parentage, and there was a great tendency to believe that they ought to be destroyed.  Luther was a decided advocate of this course, deeming the destruction of a life far preferable to the chance of having a devil in the family.  In Drayton’s poem, “The Mooncalf,” one of the gossips present at the birth of the calf suggests that it ought to be buried alive as a monster.[1] Caliban is a mooncalf,[2] and his origin is distinctly traced to a source of this description.  It is perfectly clear what was the one thing that the foul witch Sycorax did which prevented her life from being taken; and it would appear from this that the inhabitants of Argier were far more merciful in this respect than their European neighbours.  Such a charge would have sent any woman to the stake in Scotland, without the slightest hope of mercy, and the usual plea for respite would only have been an additional reason for hastening the execution of the sentence.[3]