In his book De Praestigiis Daemonum, published in 1563, he proclaimed his belief in witchcraft, but suggested that the compacts with Satan, journeys through the air on broomsticks, bearing children to Satan, raising storms and producing diseases--to which so many women and children confessed under torture--were delusions suggested and propagated by Satan himself, and that the persons charged with witchcraft were therefore to be considered "as possessed"-- that is, rather as sinned against than sinning.( 257) (257) For Wier, or Weyer, see, besides his own works, the excellent biography by Prof.Binz, of Bonn.
But neither Catholics nor Protestants would listen for a moment to any such suggestion.

Wier was bitterly denounced and persecuted.

Nor did Bekker, a Protestant divine in Holland, fare any better in the following century.

For his World Bewitched, in which he ventured not only to question the devil's power over the weather, but to deny his bodily existence altogether, he was solemnly tried by the synod of his Church and expelled from his pulpit, while his views were condemned as heresy, and overwhelmed with a flood of refutations whose mere catalogue would fill pages; and these cases were typical of many.
The Reformation had, indeed, at first deepened the superstition; the new Church being anxious to show itself equally orthodox and zealous with the old.

During the century following the first great movement, the eminent Lutheran jurist and theologian Benedict Carpzov, whose boast was that he had read the Bible fifty-three times, especially distinguished himself by his skill in demonstrating the reality of witchcraft, and by his cruelty in detecting and punishing it.