The History of the Devil

It is an adventure book. I doubt not but the title of this book will amuse some of my reading friends a little at first; they will make a pause, perhaps, as they do at a witch’s prayer, and be some time resolving whether they had best look into it or no, lest they should really raise the Devil by reading his story. Children and old women have told themselves so many frightful things of the Devil, and have form’d ideas of him in their minds, in so many horrible and monstrous shapes, that really it were enough to fright the Devil himself, to meet himself in the dark, dressed up in the several figures which imagination has formed for him in the minds of men; and as for themselves, I cannot think by any means that the Devil would terrify them half so much, if they were to converse face to face with him. It must certainly therefore be a most useful undertaking to give the true history of this Tyrant of the air, this God of the world, this terror and aversion of mankind, which we call Devil; to shew what he is, and what he is not, where he is, and where he is not, when he is in us, and when he is not; for I cannot doubt but that the Devil is really and bona fide in a great many of our honest weak-headed friends, when they themselves know nothing of the matter. Nor is the work so difficult as some may imagine.