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.
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