there are references in both the Irish[1] and American[2] trials to this rite. In Scotland the sermon was a great feature of this ceremony, and a few sentences of the Devil's discourses have been preserved. At North Berwick[3] Satan "stood as in a pulpit, making a sermon of doubtsome speeches, saying, "Many comes to the fair, and buys not all wares," and, "he had many servants who should never want, and should ail nothing; and should never let any tear fall from their eyes, so long as they served him. And gave their lessons and commands to them, as follows: 'Spare not to do evil, and to eat, drink, and be blyth, taking rest and ease, for he should raise them up at the latter day gloriously.' "Another Scotch sermon[4] is preserved in which the Devil is said to have "most blasphemously mocked his followers if they offered to trust in God, who left them miserable in the world, and neither he nor his Son Jesus Christ ever appeared to them when they called on them, as he had, who would not cheat them." In France[5] the Devil said in his sermon that he was God, and that the joy which the witches took in the Sabbath was but the commencement of a much greater glory.
After the service came the feast, and then the dance, which was one of the chief features of the whole ceremonial.
The feast is very seldom given in any detail, sometimes it was provided by the Devil,[6] sometimes by a member of the Society,[7] sometimes all the members brought their
- ↑ Holinshed, Chronicle of Ireland, p. 69. There appears to be no mention of the rite in England.
- ↑ Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay, ii. p. 55, ed. 1765. Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World, pp. 158-9, ed. 1862.
- ↑ Pitcairn, op. cit. i. pt. iii. pp. 210-12.
- ↑ Howell, State Trials, vi. 683.
- ↑ De Lancre, op. cit. pp. 401-3.
- ↑ Glanvil, Sadducismus Triumphatus, pt. ii. pp. 137-S. Sharpe, Witchcraft in Scotland, p. 130, ed. 1884.
- ↑ Kinloch and Baxter, Reliquiae Antiquae Scoticae, pp. 132-3. Spottiswoode Miscellany, i. pp. 66-7. Potts, Discoverie of Witches.
