quid non sint, quam quid sint, our subtle schoolmen, Cardans, Scaligers, profound Thomists, Fracastoriana and Ferneliana acies, are weak, dry, obscure, defective in these mysteries, and all our quickest wits, as an owl’s eyes at the sun’s light, wax dull, and are not sufficient to apprehend them; yet, as in the rest, I will adventure to say something to this point.  In former times, as we read, Acts xxiii., the Sadducees denied that there were any such spirits, devils, or angels.  So did Galen the physician, the Peripatetics, even Aristotle himself, as Pomponatius stoutly maintains, and Scaliger in some sort grants.  Though Dandinus the Jesuit, com. in lib. 2. de anima, stiffly denies it; substantiae separatae and intelligences, are the same which Christians call angels, and Platonists devils, for they name all the spirits, daemones, be they good or bad angels, as Julius Pollux Onomasticon, lib. 1. cap. 1. observes.  Epicures and atheists are of the same mind in general, because they never saw them.  Plato, Plotinus, Porphyrius, Jamblichus, Proclus, insisting in the steps of Trismegistus, Pythagoras and Socrates, make no doubt of it:  nor Stoics, but that there are such spirits, though much erring from the truth.  Concerning the first beginning of them, the [1120]Talmudists say that Adam had a wife called Lilis, before he married Eve, and of her he begat nothing but devils.  The Turks’ [1121]Alcoran is altogether as absurd and ridiculous in this point:  but the Scripture informs us Christians, how Lucifer, the chief of them, with his associates, [1122]fell from heaven for his pride and ambition; created of God, placed in heaven, and sometimes an angel of light, now cast down into the lower aerial sublunary parts, or into hell, “and delivered into chains of darkness (2 Pet. ii. 4.) to be kept unto damnation.”

Nature of Devils.] There is a foolish opinion which some hold, that they are the souls of men departed, good and more noble were deified, the baser grovelled on the ground, or in the lower parts, and were devils, the which with Tertullian, Porphyrius the philosopher, M. Tyrius, ser. 27 maintains.  “These spirits,” he [1123]saith, “which we call angels and devils, are nought but souls of men departed, which either through love and pity of their friends yet living, help and assist them, or else persecute their enemies, whom they hated,” as Dido threatened to persecute Aeneas: 

       “Omnibus umbra locis adero:  dabis improbe poenas.”

       “My angry ghost arising from the deep,
        Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep;
        At least my shade thy punishment shall know,
        And Fame shall spread the pleasing news below.”