seases; only to bring them to
some idolatry. Thus, when they have obtained their purpose that a lewd
affiance is reposed where it should not, they enter (as it were) into a
new league, and trouble them no more. What do the simple people then?
Verily suppose that the image, the cross, the thing that they have
kneeled and offered unto (the very devil indeed) hath restored them
health, whereas he did nothing but leave off to molest them. This is the
help and cure that the devils give when they leave off their wrong and
injury."[2]

[Footnote 1: Froude, History of England, cabinet edition, iii. 102.]

[Footnote 2: Calfhill, pp. 317-8. Parker Society.]

30. Here we have a distinct charge of devil-worship--the old doctrine
cropping up again after centuries of repose: "all the gods of our
opponents are devils." Nor were the Catholics a whit behind the
Protestants in this matter. The priests zealously taught that the
Protestants were devil-worshippers and magicians;[1] and the common
people so implicitly believed in the truth of the statement, that we
find one poor prisoner, taken by the Dutch at the siege of Alkmaar in
1578, making a desperate attempt to save his life by promising to
worship his captors' devil precisely as they did[2]--a suggestion that
failed to pacify those to whom it was addressed.

[Footnote 1: Hutchinson's Essay, p. 218. Harsnet, Declaration, p. 30.]

[Footnote 2: Motley, Dutch Republic, ii. 400.]

31. Having thus stated, so far as necessary, the chief laws that are
constantly working the extension of the domain of the supernatural as
far as demonology is concerned, without a remembrance of which the
subject itself would remain somewhat difficult to comprehend fully, I
shall now attempt to indicate one or two conditions of thought and
circumstance that may have tended to increase and vivify the belief
during the period in which the Elizabethan literature flourished.

32. It was an era of change. The nation was emerging from the dim
twilight of mediaevalism into the full day of political and religious
freedom. But the morning mists, which the rising sun had not yet
dispelled, rendered the more distant and complex objects distorted and
portentous. The very fact that doubt, or rather, perhaps, independence
of thought, was at last, within certain limits, treated as non-criminal
in theology, gave an impetus to investigation and speculation in all
branches of politics and science; and with this change ca