d.
Reformation, pp.

359-375.

The Jesuit Stengel, in his De judiciis divinis (Ingolstadt, 1651), devotes a whole chapter to an exorcism, by the great Canisius, of a spirit that had baffled Protestant conjuration.

Among the most jubilant Catholic satires of the time are those exulting in Luther's alleged failure as an exorcist.
But far more serious in its consequences was another rivalry to which in the sixteenth century the clergy of all creeds found themselves subject.
The revival of the science of medicine, under the impulse of the new study of antiquity, suddenly bade fair to take out of the hands of the Church the profession of which she had enjoyed so long and so profitable a monopoly.

Only one class of diseases remained unquestionably hers--those which were still admitted to be due to the direct personal interference of Satan--and foremost among these was insanity.( 364) It was surely no wonder that an age of religious controversy and excitement should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the mind; and, to men who mutually taught the utter futility of that baptismal exorcism by which the babes of their misguided neighbours were made to renounce the devil and his works, it ought not to have seemed strange that his victims now became more numerous.( 365) But so simple an explanation did not satisfy these physicians of souls; they therefore devised a simpler one: their patients, they alleged, were bewitched, and their increase was due to the growing numbers of those human allies of Satan known as witches.
(364) For the attitude of the Catholic clergy, the best sources are the confidential Jesuit Litterae Annuae.