impetus to this tendency.  In Holy Writ the Reformers found full authority for believing in the existence of evil spirits, possession by devils, witchcraft, and divine and diabolic interference by way of miracle generally; and they consequently acknowledged the possibility of the repetition of such phenomena in the times in which they lived—­a position more tenable, perhaps, than that of modern orthodoxy, that accepts without murmur all the supernatural events recorded in the Bible, and utterly rejects all subsequent relations of a similar nature, however well authenticated.  The Reformers believed unswervingly in the truth of the Biblical accounts of miracles, and that what God had once permitted to take place might and would be repeated in case of serious necessity.  But they found it utterly impossible to accept the puerile and meaningless miracles perpetrated under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church as evidence of divine interference; and they had not travelled far enough upon the road towards rationalism to be able to reject them, one and all, as in their very nature impossible.  The consequence of this was one of those compromises which we so often meet with in the history of the changes of opinion effected by the Reformation.  Only those particular miracles that were indisputably demonstrated to be impostures—­and there were plenty of them, such as the Rood of Boxley[1]—­were treated as such by them.  The unexposed remainder were treated as genuine supernatural phenomena, but caused by diabolical, not divine, agency.  The reforming divine Calfhill, supporting this view of the Catholic miracles in his answer to Martiall’s “Treatise of the Cross,” points out that the majority of supernatural events that have taken place in this world have been, most undoubtedly, the work of the devil; and puts his opponents into a rather embarrassing dilemma by citing the miracles of paganism, which both Catholic and Protestant concurred in attributing to the evil one.  He then clinches his argument by asserting that “it is the devil’s cunning that persuades those that will walk in a popish blindness” that they are worshipping God when they are in reality serving him.  “Therefore,” he continues, consciously following an argument of St. Cyprianus against the pagan miracles, “these wicked spirits do lurk in shrines, in roods, in crosses, in images:  and first of all pervert the priests, which are easiest to be caught with bait of a little gain.  Then work they miracles.  They appear to men in divers shapes; disquiet them when they are awake; trouble them in their sleeps; distort their members; take away their health; afflict them with diseases; 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]