The gradual growth of the superstructure it would be
well-nigh impossible and quite unprofitable to trace. It is due chiefly
to the credulous ignorance and distorted imagination, monkish and
otherwise, of several centuries. Carlyle's graphic picture of Abbot
Sampson's vision of the devil in "Past and Present" will perhaps do more
to explain how the belief grew and flourished than pages of explanatory
statements. It is worthy of remark, however, that to the last,
communication with evil spirits was kept up by means of formulae and
rites that are undeniably the remnants of a form of religious worship.
Incomprehensible in their jargon as these formulae mostly are, and
strongly tinctured as they have become with burlesqued Christian
symbolism and expression--for those who used them could only supply the
fast-dying memory of the elder forms from the existing system--they
still, in all their grotesqueness, remain the battered relics of a dead
faith.
29. Such being the natural history of the conflict of religions, it will
not be a matter of surprise that the leaders of our English Reformation
should, in their turn, have attributed the miracles of the Roman
Catholic saints to the same infernal source as the early Christians
supposed to have been the origin of the prodigies and oracles of
paganism. The impulse given by the secession from the Church of Rome to
the study of the Bible by all classes added impetus to this tendency.
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