of freedom of thought, Giordano Bruno, who exercised some considerable influence during his visit to England by means of his Oxford lectures and disputations, entirely denied the existence of evil spirits; but the great majority gave in their adherence to a creed that was the mean between the doctrines of the old faith and the new scepticism. Their strong common sense compelled them to reject the puerilities advanced as serious evidence by the Catholic Church; but they cast aside with equal vehemence and more horror the doctrines of the Bruno school. "That

there are devils," says Bullinger, reduced apparently from argument to invective," the Sadducees in times past denied, and at this day also some scarce religious, nay, rather Epicures, deny the same; who, unless they repent, shall one day feel, to their exceeding great pain and smart, both that there are devils, and that they are the tormentors and executioners of all wicked men and Epicures."

"1

109. It must be remembered, too, that the emancipation from medievalism was a very gradual process, not, as we are too prone to think it, a revolution suddenly and completely effected. It was an evolution, not an explosion. There is found, in consequence, a great divergence of opinion, not only between the earliest and the later Reformers, but between the statements of the same man at different periods of his career. Tyndale, for instance, seems to have believed in the actual possession of the

■ Bullinger, Fourth Decade, 9th Sermon, p. 348. Parker Society.

GRADUAL CHANGE OF BELIEF.

123

human body by devils; and this appears to have been the opinion of the majority at the beginning of the Reformation, for the first Prayer-book of Edward VI. contained the Catholic form of exorcism for driving devils out of children, which was expunged upon revision, the doctrine of obsession having in the mean time triumphed over the older belief. It is necessary to bear these facts in mind whilst considering any attempt to depict the general bearings of a belief such as that in evil spirits; for many irreconcilable statements are to be found among the authorities; and it is the duty of the writer to sift out and describe those views which predominated, and these must not be supposed to be proved inaccurate because a chance quotation can be produced in contradiction.

110. There is great danger, in the attempt to bring under analysis any phase of religious belief, that the method of treatment may appear unsympathetic, if not irreverent. The greatest effort has been made in these pages to avoid this fault as far as possible; for, without doubt, any form of religious dogma, however barbarous, however seemingly ridiculous, if it has once been sincerely believed and trusted by any portion of mankind, is entitled to reverent treatment. No body of great and good men can at any time credit and take comfort from a lie pure and simple; and if an extinct creed appears to lack that foundation of truth which makes creeds tolerable, it is safer to assume that it had a meaning and a truthfulness, to those who held it, that lapse of

1 1 Tyndale, p. 82. Parker Society.

time has tended to destroy, together with the creed itself, than to condemn men wholesale as knaves and hypocrites. But the particular subject which has here been dealt with will surely be considered to be specially entitled to respect, when it is remembered that it was once an integral portion of the belief of most of our best and bravest ancestors-of men and women who dared to witness to their own sincerity amidst the fires of persecution and in the solitude of exile. It has nearly all disappeared now. The terrific hierarchy of fiends, which was so real, so full of horror three hundred years ago,1 has gradually vanished away before the advent of fuller knowledge and purer faith, and is now hardly thought of, unless as a dead mediæval myth. But let us deal tenderly with it, remembering that the day may come when the beliefs that are nearest to our hearts may be treated as open to contempt or ridicule, and the dogmas to which we most passionately cling will, "like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a wrack behind."

1 Perhaps the following prayer, contained in Thomas Becon's "Pomander," shows more clearly than the comments of any critic the reality of the terror :

"An infinite number of wicked angels there are, O Lord Christ, which without ceasing seek my destruction. Against this exceeding great multitude of evil spirits send Thou me Thy blessed and heavenly angels, which may deliver me from their tyranny. Thou, O Lord, hast devoured hell, and overcome the prince of darkness and all his ministers; yea, and that not for Thyself, but for those that believe in Thee. Suffer me not, therefore, to be overcome of Satan and of his servants, but rather let me triumph over them, that I, through strong faith and help of the blessed angels, having the victory of the hellish army, may with a joyful heart say, Death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory?—and so for ever and ever magnify Thy Holy Name. Amen." Parker Society, p. 84.

III. Little attempt has hitherto been made, in the way of direct proof, to show that fairies are really only a class of devils who exercise their powers in a manner less terrible and revolting than that depicted by theologians; and for this reason chieflythat the proposition is already more than half established when it has been shown that the attributes and functions possessed by both fairy and devil are similar in kind, although differing in degree. This has already been done to a great extent in the preceding pages, where the various actions of Puck and Ariel have been shown to differ in no essential respect from those of the devils of the time; but before commencing to study this phase of supernaturalism in Shakspere's works as a whole, and as indicative, to a certain extent, of the development of his thought upon the relation of man to the invisible world about and above him, it is necessary that this identity should be admitted without a shadow of a doubt.

112. It has been shown that fairies were probably the descendants of the lesser local deities, as devils were of the more important of the heathen gods.

2

that were overturned by the advancing wave of Christianity, although in the course of time this distinction was entirely obliterated and forgotten. It has also been shown, as before mentioned, that many of the powers exercised by fairies were in their essence similar to those exercised by devils, especially that of appearing in divers shapes. These parallels could be carried out to an almost unlimited extent; but a few proofs only need be cited to show this identity. In the medieval romance of "King Orfeo" fairyland has been substituted for the classical Hades.1 King James, in his "Dæmonologie," adopts a fourfold classification c. devils, one of which he names "Phairie," and co-ordinates with the incubus.2 The name of the devil supposed to preside at the witches' sabbaths is sometimes given as Hecat, Diana, Sybilla; sometimes Queen of Elfame, or Fairie. Indeed, Shakspere's line in "The Comedy of Errors," had it not been unnecessarily tampered with by the critics

"A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough,"

would have conclusively proved this identity of cha

racter.

113. The real distinction between these two classes of spirits depends on the condition of national

Fairy Mythology of Shakspere, Hazlitt, p. 83.

* Dæmonologie, p. 69. An instance of a fairy incubus is given in the "Life of Robin Goodfellow," Hazlitt's Fairy Mythology, p. 176. Pitcairn, iii. p. 162.

Ibid. i. p. 162, and many other places.

Fairy has been altered to "fury," but compare Peele, Battle of Alcazar: "Fiends, fairies, hags that fight in beds of steel."