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way in crime, and that, perhaps, farther in these our days of boasted morals, than was known among our fathers; the only difference that I meet with between the sons of Belial in former days and those of our ages, seems to be in the Devil's management, not in theirs; the sum of which amounts to this, that Satan seems to act with more cunning, and they with less; for, in the former ages of Satan's dominion, he had much business upon his hands, all his art and engines, and engineers also, were kept fully employed, to wheedle, allure, betray, and circumvent people, and draw them into crimes, and they found him, as we may say, a full employment. I doubt not, he was called the Tempter on that very account; but the case seems quite altered now, the tables are turned; then the Devil tempted men to sin, but now, in short, they tempt the Devil; men push into crimes before he pushes them; they outshoot him in his own bow, outrun him on his own ground, and, as we say of some hotspurs who ride post, they whip the postboy; in a word, the Devil seems to have no business now but to sit still and look on.

This I must confess, seems to intimate some secret compact between the Devil and them; but then it looks, not as if they had contracted with the Devil for leave to sin, but that the Devil had contracted with them that they should sin so and so, up to such a degree, and that without giving him the trouble of daily solicitation, private management, and artful screwing up their passions, their affections, and their most retired faculties, as he was before obliged to do.

This also appears more agreeable to the nature of the thing; and as it is a most exquisite part of Satan's cunning, so it is an undoubted testimony of his success; if it was not so, he could never bring his kingdom to such a height of absolute power as he has done: this also solves several difficulties in the affair of the world's present way of sinning, which otherwise it would be very hard to understand; as particularly how some eminent men of quality among us, whose upper rooms are not extraordinary well furnished in other cases, yet are so very witty in their wickedness, that they gather admirers by hundreds and thousands; who, however heavy, lumpish, slow, and backward, even by nature and in force of constitution, in better things, yet, in their race devilwards, then Helt f

foot, and outrun all their neighbours; fellows that are a empty of sense as beggars are of honesty, and as far from brains as a whore is of modesty; on a sudden you shall find them dip into polemics, study Michael Servetus, Socinus, and the most learned of their disciples; they shall reason against all religion, as strongly as a philosopher, blaspheme with such a keenness of wit, and satirize God and eternity with such a brightness of fancy, as if the soul of a Rochester or a Hobbes was transmigrated into them; in a little length of time more they banter heaven, burlesque the Trinity, and jest with every sacred thing, and all so sharp, so ready, and so terribly witty, as if they were born buffoons, and were singled out by nature to be champions for the Devil.

Whence can all this come? how is the change wrought? who but the Devil can inject wit in spite of natural dulness, create brains, fill empty heads, and supply the vacuities in the understanding? And will Satan do all this for nothing? No, no, he is too wise for that; I can never doubt a secret compact, if there is such a thing in nature; when I see a head where there was no head, sense in posse where there is no sense in esse, wit without brains, and sight without eyes, it is all devil-work: could G- write satires, that could neither read Latin or spell English; like old Sir William Read, who wrote a book of optics, which when it was printed, he did not know which was the right side uppermost and which the wrong? Could this eminent uninformed beau turn atheist, and make wise speeches against that Being which made him a fool, if the Devil had not sold him some wit in exchange for that trifle of his, called soul? Had he not bartered his inside with that son of the morning, to have his tongue tipped with blasphemy, he that knew nothing of a God, but only to swear by him, could never have set up for a wit to burlesque his providence and ridicule his government of the world.

As the

But the Devil, as he is god of the world, has one particu lar advantage, and that is, that when he has work to do he very seldom wants instruments; with this circumstance also, that the degeneracy of human nature supplies him. late King of France said of himself, when they told him what a calamity was like to befall his kingdom by the famine: Well, says the king, then I shall not want soldiers; and it was so; want of bread supplied his army with recruits, so

CHOICE OF MESSENGERS.

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want of grace supplies the Devil with reprobates for his work.

Another reason why I think the Devil has made more bargains of that kind we speak of, in this age, is, because he seems to have laid by his cloven foot; all his old emissaries, the tools of his trade, the engineers which he employed in his mines, such as witches, warlocks, magicians, conjurors, astrologers, and all the hellish train or rabble of human devils, who did his drudgery in former days, seem to be out of work: I shall give you a fuller enumeration of them in the next chapter.

These, I say, seem to be laid aside; not that his work is abated, or that his business with mankind, for their delusion and destruction, is not the same, or perhaps more than ever; but the Devil seems to have changed hands; the temper and genius if mankind is altered, and they are not to be taken by fright and horror, as they were then: the figures of those creatures were always dismal and horrible, and that is it which I mean by the cloven foot; but now wit, beauty, and gay things, are the sum of his craft; he manages by the soft and the smooth, the fair and the artful, the kind and the cunning, not by the frightful and terrible, the ugly and the odious.

When the Devil, for weighty despatches,

Wanted messengers cunning and bold,

He pass'd by the beautiful faces,
And pick'd out the ugly and old.

Of these he made warlocks and witches,
To run of his errands by night;
Till the over-wrought hag-ridden wretches,
Were as fit as the Devil to fright.

But whoever has been his adviser,
As his kingdom increases in growth;
He now takes his measures much wiser,
And traffics with beauty and youth.

Disguis'd in the wanton and witty,

He haunts both the church and the court;
And sometimes he visits the city,

Where all the best Christians resort.

Thus dress'd up in full masquerade,

He the bolder can range up and down;
For he better can drive on his trade,

In any one's name than his own.

CHAPTER IX.

OF THE TOOLS THE DEVIL WORKS WITH; VIZ., WITCHES, WIZARDS OR WARLOCKS, CONJURERS, MAGICIANS, DIVINES, ASTROLOGERS, INTERPRETERS OF DREAMS, TELLERS OF FORTUNES; AND, ABOVE ALL THE REST, HIS PARTICULAR MODERN PRIVY COUNCILLORS CALLED WITS AND FOOLS.

THOUGH, as I have advanced in the foregoing chapter, the Devil has very much changed hands in his modern management of the world, and that, instead of the rabble and long train of implements reckoned up above, he now walks about in beaus, beauties, wits, and fools; yet I must not omit to tell you that he has not dismissed his former regiments, but, like officers in time of peace, he keeps them all in half-pay; or, like extraordinary men at the custom-house, they are kept at a call, to be ready to fill up vacancies, or to employ when he is more than ordinarily full of business; and therefore it may not be amiss to give some brief account of them from Satan's own memoirs, their performance being no inconsiderable part of his history.

Nor will it be an unprofitable digression to go back a little to the primitive institution of all these orders, for they are very ancient, and I assure you it requires great knowledge of antiquity to give a particular of their original; I shall be very brief in it.

In order then to this inquiry, you must know that it was not for want of servants that Satan took this sort of people into his pay; he had, as I have observed in its place, millions of diligent devils at his call, whatever business, and however difficult, he had for them to do; but, as I have said above, that our modern people are forwarder than even the Devil himself can desire them to be, and that they come before they are called, run before they are sent, and crowd themselves into his service; so it seems it was in those early days, when the world was one universal monarchy under his dominion, as I have at large described it in its place.

In those days, the wickedness of the world keeping a just pace with their ignorance, this inferior sort of low-prized instruments did the Devil's work mighty well; they drudged on in his black art so laboriously, and with such good success, that he found it was better to employ them as tools to delude

1

THE CHALDEANS BECOME EMISSARIES.

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about, and oblige them to take such shapes and dresses as were necessary, upon every trifling occasion; which, perhaps, was more cost than worship, more pains than pay.

Having then a set of these volunteers in his service, the true Devil had nothing to do but to keep an exact correspondence with them, and communicate some needful powers to them, to make them be and do something extraordinary, and give them a reputation in their business; and these, in a word, did a great part of, nay, almost all the Devil's business in the world.

To this purpose gave he them power (if we may believe old Glanville, Baxter, Hicks, and other learned consulters of oracles), to walk invisible, to fly in the air, ride upon broomsticks, and other wooden gear, to interpret dreams, answer questions, betray secrets, to talk (gibberish) the universal language, to raise storms, sell winds, bring up spirits, disturb the dead, and torment the living, with a thousand other needful tricks to amuse the world, keep themselves in veneration, and carry on the Devil's empire in the world.

The first nations among whom these infernal practices were found, were the Chaldeans; and, that I may do justice in earnest, as well as in jest, it must be allowed that the Chaldeans, or those of them so called, were not conjurers or magicians, only philosophers and studiers of nature, wise, sober, and studious men at first; and we have an extraordinary account of them; and if we may believe some of our best writers of fame, Abraham was himself famous among them for such magic, as Sir Walter Raleigh expresses it, Qui contemplatione creaturarum cognovit Creatorem.

Now granting this, it is all to my purpose, namely, that the Devil drew these wise men in, to search after more knowledge than nature could instruct them in; and the knowledge of the true God being at that time sunk very low, he debauched them all with dreams, apparitions, conjurers, &c., till he ruined the just notions they had, and made devils of them all, like himself.

The learned Senensis, speaking of this Chaldean kind of learning, gives us an account of five sorts of them; you will pardon me for being so grave as to go this length back.

1. Chascedin or Chaldeans, properly so called, being

astronomers.

2. Asaphim or magicians, such was Zoroastres, and Balaam the son of Beor.