This revelation speedily ripened the belief that, whatever might be going on at the witches' sabbath--no matter how triumphant Satan might be--at the moment of sounding the consecrated bells the Satanic power was paralyzed.

This theory once started, proofs came in to support it, during a hundred years, from the torture chambers in all parts of Europe.
Throughout the later Middle Ages the Dominicans had been the main agents in extorting and promulgating these revelations, but in the centuries following the Reformation the Jesuits devoted themselves with even more keenness and vigour to the same task.

Some curious questions incidentally arose.

It was mooted among the orthodox authorities whether the damage done by storms should or should not be assessed upon the property of convicted witches.

The theologians inclined decidedly to the affirmative; the jurists, on the whole, to the negative.( 252) (252) For proofs of the vigour of the Jesuits in this persecution, see not only the histories of witchcraft, but also the Annuae litterae of the Jesuits themselves, passim.
In spite of these tortures, lightning and tempests continued, and great men arose in the Church throughout Europe in every generation to point out new cruelties for the discovery of "weather-makers," and new methods for bringing their machinations to naught.
But here and there, as early as the sixteenth century, we begin to see thinkers endeavouring to modify or oppose these methods.