Green Henry

Another fruitful source of strange tales was Roman Catholicism, with its legacy of deserted cloisters and the still surviving monasteries which were to be found here and there in the region that was still Catholic. To these tales the members of the orders inhabiting these monasteries contributed much, especially the Capuchin monks who to this day work hand in hand with the executioners in the exorcizing of devils, and in other such arts, among the superstitious peasants of the reformed faith. In a few remote districts at that time, there prevailed a spiritless, decayed type of Protestantism; the inhabitants did not hold themselves above the Catholics, looking down on them as deluded folk, but they faithfully shared their belief in all the fables, though they held them to be in substance evil and deserving of repudiation, and they did not laugh at Catholicism, rather they feared it as something sinister and heathenish. It was impossible for them to recognize a free thinker as a man who in his inmost heart really believes nothing at all, and they were just as little able to conceive of anyone believing too much; their limit simply was that they would hold only to those doctrines that were good, and not to the evil.