[Footnote 1:  Potts, Discoveries.  Edit.  Cheetham Society.]

[Footnote 2:  Cf.  B. Jonson’s Alchemist.]

[Footnote 3:  A Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts relating to Witchcraft, 1838.]

[Footnote 4:  III. ii. 51, et seq.]

54.  But it was not invariably a repulsive or ridiculous form that was assumed by these enemies of mankind.  Their ingenuity would have been but little worthy of commendation had they been content to appear as ordinary human beings, or animals, or even in fancy costume.  The Swiss divine Bullinger, after a lengthy and elaborately learned argument as to the particular day in the week of creation upon which it was most probable that God called the angels into being, says, by way of peroration, “Let us lead a holy and angel-like life in the sight of God’s holy angels.  Let us watch, lest he that transfigureth and turneth himself into an angel of light under a good show and likeness deceive us."[1] They even went so far, according to Cranmer,[2] as to appear in the likeness of Christ, in their desire to mislead mankind; for—­

    “When devils will the blackest sins put on,
    They do suggest at first with heavenly shows."[3]

[Footnote 1:  Bullinger, Fourth Decade, 9th Sermon.  Parker Society.]

[Footnote 2:  Cranmer, Confutation, p. 42.  Parker Society.]

[Footnote 3:  Othello, II. iii. 357.  Cf.  Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 257; Comedy of Errors, IV. iii. 56.]

55.  But one of the most ordinary forms supposed at this period to be assumed by devils was that of a dead friend of the object of the visitation.  Before the Reformation, the belief that the spirits of the departed had power at will to revisit the scenes and companions of their earthly life was almost universal.  The reforming divines distinctly denied the possibility of such a revisitation, and accounted for the undoubted phenomena, as usual, by attributing them to the devil.[1] James I. says that the devil, when appearing to men, frequently assumed the form of a person newly dead, “to make them believe that it was some good spirit that appeared to them, either to forewarn them of the death of their friend, or else to discover unto them the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slauchter....  For he dare not so illude anie that knoweth that neither can the spirit of the defunct returne to his friend, nor yet an angell use such formes."[2] He further explains that such devils follow mortals to obtain two ends:  “the one is the tinsell (loss) of their life by inducing them to such perrilous places at such times as he either follows or possesses them.  The other thing that he preases to obtain is the tinsell of their soule."[3]

[Footnote 1:  See Hooper’s Declaration of the Ten Commandments.  Parker Society.  Hooper, 326.]

[Footnote 2:  Daemonologie, p. 60.]

[Footnote 3:  Cf.  Hamlet, I. iv. 60-80; and post, sec. 58.]