Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having more power with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it out with yet greater harshness.

Beza was especially severe against those who believed insanity to be a natural malady, and declared, "Such persons are refuted both by sacred and profane history." Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the older Church and in the new, this superstition was developed more and more into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in the sculptures and windows and mural decorations of the great medieval cathedrals, had done much to develop it among the people, so Luther's translation of the Bible, especially in the numerous editions of it illustrated with engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it.

In every peasant's cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of the Temple--of the woman with seven devils--of the devils cast into the swine.

Every peasant's child could be made to understand the quaint pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which illustrated vividly all those texts.

In the ideas thus deeply implanted, the men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled against this mass of folly and cruelty found the worst barrier to right reason.( 362) (362) For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar passages in his works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, pp.