soul, freeze thy
young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their
spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each
particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful
porcupine."

19 Catechism of the Council of Trent.

20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, pars Suppl. Quast. 69.

A few specimens of the stories embodying the ideas and
superstitions current in the Middle Age may better illustrate the
characteristic belief of the time than much abstract description.
An unquestioning faith in the personality, visibility, and
extensive agency of the devil was almost universal. Ascetics,
saints, bishops, peasants, philosophers, kings, Gregory the Great,
Martin Luther, all testified that they had often seen him. The
mediaval conception of the devil was sometimes comical, sometimes
awful. Grimm says, "He was Jewish, heathenish, Christian,
idolatrous, elfish, titanic, spectral, all at once." He was "a
soul snatching wolf," a "hell hound," a "whirlwind hammer;" now an
infernal "parody of God" with "a mother who mimics the Virgin
Mary," and now the "impersonated soul of evil."21 The well known
story of Faust and the Devil, which in so many forms spread
through Christendom, is so deeply significant of the faith and
life of the age in which it arose that a volume would be required
to unfold all its import. There was an old tradition that the
students of necromancy or the black art, on reaching a certain
pitch of proficiency, were obliged to run through a subterranean
hall, where the devil literally caught the hindmost unless he sped
so swiftly that the arch enemy could only seize his shadow, and in
that case, a veritable Peter Schlemihl, he never cast a shadow
afterwards! A man stood by his furnace one day casting eyes for
buttons. The devil came up and asked what he was doing. "Casting
eyes," replied the man. "Can you cast a pair for me?" quoth the
devil. "That I can," says the man: "will you have them large or
small?" "Oh, very large," answered the devil. He then ties the
fiend on a bench and pours the molten lead into his eyes. Up jumps
the devil, with the bench on his back, flees howling, and has
never been seen since! There was also in wide circulation a wild
legend to the effect that a man made a compact with the devil on
the condition that he should secure a new victim for hell once in
a century. As long as he did this he should enjoy life, riches,
power, and a limited ubiquity; but failin