Page:History of the devil, ancient and modern (1).pdf/6

6 and Mouth, &c. from the greatest to the least. As to his propagating religion, it is a little hard indeed at first sight; For example.

I think it no injury at all to the Devil, to say that he had a great hand in the old holy war, as it was ignorantly and enthusiastically called; stirring up the Christian princes and powers of Europe to run a mading after the Turks and Saracens; and make war with those innocent people above a thousand miles off, only because they entered into God's heritage when he had forsaken it; grazed upon his ground when he had fairly turned it into a common, and laid open for the next comer: spending their nation's treasure, and embarking their Kings and people (I say) in a war above a thousand miles off, filling their heads with that religious madness, called in those days, Holy Zeal, to recover the Terra sancta, the sepulchres of Christ and the saints, and as they called falsely the Holy City, though true religion says it was the accursed city, and not worth spending one drop of blood for.

This religious bubble was certainly of Satan, who, as he craftily drew them in, so like a true devil, he left them in the lurch when they came there, faced about to the Saracens, animated the immortal Sladin against them, and managed so dextrouslydexterously [sic], that he left the bones of about thirteen or fourteen hundred thousand Christians there, as a trophy of his infernal politics: And after the Christian world had run al a sante terra, or in English, a sauntering about a hundred years, he dropt it to play another game less foolish, but ten times more wicked than that which went before it: namely, turning the crusadoescrusades [sic] of the Christians one