* * *

This _Malleus_ (or Mallet), like all books of the same class, contains
a singular avowal, namely, that the Devil is gaining ground; in other
words, that God is losing it; that mankind, after being saved by
Christ, is becoming the Devil's prey. Too clearly indeed does he step
forward from legend to legend. What a way he has made between the time
of the Gospels, when he was only too glad to get into the swine, and
the days of Dante, when, as lawyer and divine, he argues with the
saints, pleads his cause, and by way of closing a successful
syllogism, bears away the soul he was fighting for, saying, with a
triumphant laugh, "You didn't know that I was a logician!"

In the earlier days of the Middle Ages he waits till the last pangs to
seize the soul and bear it off. Saint Hildegarde, about 1100, thinks
that "_he cannot enter the body of a living man_, for else his limbs
would fly off in all directions: it is but the shadow and the smoke of
the Devil which pass therein." That last gleam of good sense vanishes
in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth we find a suppliant so
afraid of being caught alive that he has himself watched day and night
by two hundred armed men.

Then begins a period of increasing terror, in which men trust
themselves less and ever less to God's protection. The Demon is no
longer a stealthy sprite, no longer a thief by night, gliding through
the gloom. He becomes the fearless adversary, the daring ape of
Heaven, who in broad daylight mimics God's creation under God's own
sun. Is it the legends tell us this? Nay, it is the greatest of the
doctors. "The Devil," says Albert the Great, "transforms all living
things." St. Thomas goes yet further. "All changes that may occur
naturally by means of seeds, can be copied by the Devil." What an
astounding concession, which coming from the mouth of so grave a
personage, means nothing short of setting up one Creator face to face
with another! "But in things done without the germinal process," he
adds, "such as the changing of men into beasts or the resurrection of
the dead, there the Devil can do nothing." Thus to God is left the
smaller part of His work! He may only perform miracles, a kind of
action alike singular and infrequent. But the daily miracle of life is
not for Him alone: His copyist, the Devil, shares with Him the world
of nature!

For man himself, whose weak eyes see no difference between nature as
sprung from God and nature a