terrible scourges were attributed to the
malevolence of the Evil One.

[Footnote 1: See secs. 63, 64.]

[Footnote 2: I Hooper, p. 308. Parker Society.]

78. But it is curious to notice that, although possessing such terrible
powers over the bodies and minds of mortals, devils were not believed to
be potent enough to destroy the lives of the persons they persecuted
unless they could persuade their victims to renounce God. This theory
probably sprang out of the limitation imposed by the Almighty upon the
power of Satan during his temptation of Job, and the advice given to the
sufferer by his wife, "Curse God, and die." Hence, when evil spirits
began their assaults upon a man, one of their first endeavours was to
induce him to do some act that would be equivalent to such a
renunciation. Sometimes this was a bond assigning the victim's soul to
the Evil One in consideration of certain worldly advantages; sometimes a
formal denial of his baptism; sometimes a deed that drives away the
guardian angel from his side, and leaves the devil's influence
uncounteracted. In "The Witch of Edmonton,"[1] the first act that Mother
Sawyer demands her familiar to perform after she has struck her bargain,
is to kill her enemy Banks; and the fiend has reluctantly to declare
that he cannot do so unless by good fortune he could happen to catch him
cursing. Both Harpax[2] and Mephistophiles[3] suggest to their victims
that they have power to destroy their enemies, but neither of them is
able to exercise it. Faust can torment, but not kill, his would-be
murderers; and Springius and Hircius are powerless to take Dorothea's
life. In the latter case it is distinctly the protection of the guardian
angel that limits the diabolic power; so it is not unnatural that
Gratiano should think the cursing of his better angel from his side the
"most desperate turn" that poor old Brabantio could have done himself,
had he been living to hear of his daughter's cruel death.[4] It is next
to impossible for people in the present day to have any idea what a
consolation this belief in a good attendant spirit, specially appointed
to guard weak mortals through life, to ward off evils, and guide to
eternal safety, must have been in a time when, according to the current
belief, any person, however blameless, however holy, was liable at any
moment to be possessed by a devil, or harried and tortured by a witch.

[Footnote 1: Act II. sc. i.]

[Footnote 2: The Virgin Mart