[Footnote 1:  Ed. 1748, p. 171.]

[Footnote 2:  Tempest, II. ii. 111, 115.]

[Footnote 3:  Cf.  Othello, I. i. 91.  Titus Andronicus, IV. ii.]

108.  In the preceding pages an endeavour has been made to delineate the most prominent features of a belief which the great Reformation was destined first to foster into unnatural proportions and vitality, and in the end to destroy.  Up to the period of the Reformation, the creed of the nation had been practically uniform, and one set of dogmas was unhesitatingly accepted by the people as infallible, and therefore hardly demanding critical consideration.  The great upheaval of the sixteenth century rent this quiescent uniformity into shreds; doctrines until then considered as indisputable were brought within the pale of discussion, and hence there was a great diversity of opinion, not only between the supporters of the old and of the new faith, but between the Reformers themselves.  This was conspicuously the case with regard to the belief in the devils and their works.  The more timid of the Reformers clung in a great measure to the Catholic opinions; a small band, under the influence possibly of that knight-errant of freedom of thought, Giordano Bruno, who exercised some considerable influence during his visit to England by means of his Oxford lectures and disputations, entirely denied the existence of evil spirits; but the great majority gave in their adherence to a creed that was the mean between the doctrines of the old faith and the new scepticism.  Their strong common sense compelled them to reject the puerilities advanced as serious evidence by the Catholic Church; but they cast aside with equal vehemence and more horror the doctrines of the Bruno school.  “That there are devils,” says Bullinger, reduced apparently from argument to invective, “the Sadducees in times past denied, and at this day also some scarce religious, nay, rather Epicures, deny the same; who, unless they repent, shall one day feel, to their exceeding great pain and smart, both that there are devils, and that they are the tormentors and executioners of all wicked men and Epicures."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Bullinger, Fourth Decade, 9th Sermon, p. 348, Parker Society.]

109.  It must be remembered, too, that the emancipation from medievalism was a very gradual process, not, as we are too prone to think it, a revolution suddenly and completely effected.  It was an evolution, not an explosion.  There is found, in consequence, a great divergence of opinion, not only between the earliest and the later Reformers, but between the statements of the same man at different periods of his career.  Tyndale, for instance, seems to have believed in the actual possession of the human body by devils;[1] and this appears to have been the opinion of the majority at the beginning of the Reformation, for the first Prayer-book of Edward VI. contained the Catholic form of exorcism for driving devils out of