The glory of God is increased in us by this, because certain glorious attributes of God are thus manifested to us. Constancy in his decrees is shown, because, just as he created the human being free, so he allows him to sin freely and does not impede this freedom. Sweetness in governing is also discerned, because, since he gave even to the demon free will, it would seem violent always to prevent what the Devil naturally can do and most eagerly desires. Therefore he sometimes permits him to accomplish it.
His clemency toward the human race shines out from this, because if the Devil were permitted to harm as much as he wishes and can, no one would be unharmed; indeed he would kill all human beings. Therefore God more often denies him the faculty of harming. In addition, God does not disdain to receive to repentance even those who have bound themselves to the demon by covenants and by giving a written bond. Is this not the height of clemency, when where sin abounded, grace superabounds, and the mercy of God is over all his works?
Wisdom shines out, because although God allows the Devil to use his natural powers, nevertheless he brings it about that this father of the proud is often overcome by weak little humans who savor the things that are of God, and that he casts himself down to bear and suffer the filthiest and lowest things, though he tried to place his throne above the north. Moreover, because God is accustomed to draw good from evils, he makes one person’s sin become another person’s merit.
[margin: Augustine on Psalm 77; Job 1 and 2; Deuteronomy 13:3; Augustine, tractate 7 on John; Leo, sermon 19 on the Passion; Clement of Rome, Recognitions, book 2; Dialogues, book 1, chapter 14]
Power shines out, because when he permits the demon to do greater things, for example, to turn water into blood and produce frogs, nevertheless he does not allow him to accomplish lesser things, for example, to generate gnats. This incidentally demonstrates that the demon is wholly subject to God and under law, and that he can do nothing without God’s license. According to St. Augustine, he serves God as a lictor or executioner serves a prince.
Justice is finally proved, because in this way he punishes human crimes even in this life. Since this also benefits the human being himself, this reason belongs also to the other head and is mixed; therefore I have reserved it for the last place.
The second head was human utility, and this is manifold. First, in those who have been harmed by harmful magic, patience is exercised, constancy is strengthened, merits are increased, and people are recalled to repentance and to the use of the sacraments of the Church. Second, it becomes clear to each person whether he loves God or not. For those who do not love God then flee to forbidden arts; those who love God bear patiently and entrust themselves to the divine will and protection.
[margin: Marulus, book 2, chapter 12, and book 4, chapter 10; Fulgosius, book 6, chapter 9; Tertullian to Scapula and Cyprian against Demetrian]
Third, through these things true humility is acquired, as is confirmed by the example of a certain hermit in Severus Sulpicius. Fourth, they smooth an easy path to every kind of virtue. Thus it happened to blessed Julian: when, through the Devil’s fraud, he had killed both his parents, this became for him an occasion of a better life. Does not affliction usually give understanding and preserve souls from sins that are imminent and already present?
Fifth, the Catholic faith is confirmed and propagated in this way. Faith is thus established against unbelievers and atheists, who deny that spirits and angels exist, for experience itself convicts them. Because such people existed when Christ the Lord was living on earth, more frequent mention is made of energumens in a span of three years than in the whole Old Testament through so many centuries. And because a similar error of the Peripatetics existed in the primitive Church, so many were then possessed by demons and freed.
Because today atheism is sprouting again from the root of Calvinism, so examinations of harmful-magicians, cut short in many places, are multiplying. Then, against the faithlessness of the heretics of our time, our faith is established when we see that the harms caused by the fraud of demons through magicians are in no way remedied by their co-initiates, as I may say with Florentel, but that demons hold the exorcisms of the innovators in the same place as they once held the Jewish exorcisms of the sons of Sceva. These seven, as imitators tend to do, imitated St. Paul in exorcisms; but the Devil, insulting them, cried out that he knew Jesus and knew Paul, but did not know them. The energumen leapt upon them and prevailed against them, as a master over slaves, and forced them to flee naked and wounded.
[margin: Acts 19:13; Staphylus, response against Smidelinus; Lindanus, Dialogues, book 3; Bredenbach; printed French acts of the possessed person and Faius’s Energumenus or Alexicacus; Lindanus, On Fleeing Idols, book 1, chapter 14; Bredenbach, book 7, chapters 37 and 39]
Did not the demon at Wittenberg drive Luther into the greatest straits and a flux of the bowels? Staphylus, an eyewitness and at that time Luther’s follower, narrates the story. Did not a demon at Birgellis in 1582 despise a Lutheran pastor and say that he was being beaten by a Franciscan, who easily cast him out? Bredenbach narrates the same story. Did not Doctor Simon, a Catholic pastor, at Augsburg in 1563 free an energumen whom several ministers of the Augsburg confession had tried to free in vain? The same writer is witness.
Did not a demon from the mouth of the possessed woman of Laon, mocking the Calvinists, cry out in everyone’s hearing in 1566 that he had nothing to fear from them, since they were friends and confederates? The matter is more widely known in all Picardy than that it can be denied. Indeed, it was observed both when Luther died, that demons flew from the possessed at Gheel in Brabant to Luther’s funeral, and when the iconoclastic riot occurred in Belgium in 1566, that possessed people at both Gheel and Amsterdam were again abandoned by demons so that the demons might be present with the Gueux.
The Calvinists, in turn, to show their grateful mind, left only a red demon, which I myself saw, in a glass window containing an image of the Last Judgment at the church of St. Medard in Paris. In St. Paul’s church in London they left only the image of the Devil whom St. Michael trampled underfoot. At Antwerp, in the chief church, I saw only the statue of the Devil left, the one sitting by the evil thief’s window. At Roermond they left only the image of the little purse-carrying demon who is usually painted beside St. Genevieve. Finally, at Leiden, when they ran out to overthrow the suburban Franciscan monastery, they carried before them, in place of a banner, an image of the Devil fixed to a long spear shaft, so that it might appear whose hired soldiers they were, and under whose authority they served.
[margin: Lindanus, book 1, chapter 15; Bredenbach, chapter 38]
Every day we see demons, harmful-magicians, and innovators borne against Catholics almost with common minds and hatreds; yet the gravest attempts and injuries of magicians and the Devil are either rendered void or abolished by Catholic prayers, blessings, sacred things, and sacraments, as will be proved at length later in the final book.
[margin: Lindanus and Bredenbach above the section break; Gregory, Dialogues, book 3, chapter 33, and book 1, chapter 20]