The judicial prosecution of animals, resulting in their excommunication by the Church or their execution by the hangman, had its origin in the common superstition of the age, which has left such a tragical record of itself in the incredibly absurd and atrocious annals of witchcraft. The same ancient code that condemned a homicidal ox to be stoned, declared that a witch should not be suffered to live, and although the Jewish lawgiver may have regarded the former enactment chiefly as a police regulation designed to protect persons against unruly cattle, it was, like the decree of death against witches, genetically connected with the Hebrew cult and had therefore an essentially religious character. It was these two paragraphs of the Mosaic law that Christian tribunals in the Middle Ages were wont to adduce as their authority for prosecuting and punishing both classes of delinquents, although in the application of them they were undoubtedly incited by motives and influenced by fears wholly foreign to the mind of the Levitical legislator. The extension of Christianity beyond the boundaries of Judaism and the conversion of Gentile nations led to its gradual but radical transformation. The propagation of the new and aggressive faith among the Greeks and Romans, and especially among the Indo-Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, necessarily deposed, degraded and demonized the ancestral deities of the proselytes, who were taught henceforth to abjure the gods of their fathers and to denounce them as devils. Thus missionary zeal and success, while saving human souls from endless perdition, served also to enlarge the realm of the Prince of Darkness and to increase the number of his subjects and satellites. The new convert saw them with his mind’s eye skulking about in obscure places, haunting forest dells and mountain streams by day, approaching human habitations by night and waiting for opportunities to lure him back to the old worship or to take vengeance upon him for his recreancy. Every untoward event furnished an occasion for their intervention, which could be averted or repelled only by the benedictions, exorcisms or anathemas of the Church. The ecclesiastical authorities were therefore directly interested in encouraging this superstitious belief as one of the chief sources of their power, and it was for this reason that diabolical agencies were assumed to be at work in every maleficent force of nature and to be incarnate in every noxious creature. That this doctrine is still held and this policy still pursued by the bishops and other clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, no one familiar with the literature of the subject can deny.