The monks often fancied that they saw the misshapen forms of demons, and heard their diabolical whispers. Too illiterate or obtuse to account for natural phenomena, they supposed that they had a hand in regulating the operations of Nature; and, too unacquainted with the habits of the brute creation to understand their mechanical capacity, they regarded the contrivances of animals as the undoubted fruit of a nocturnal adventure of the infernal inhabitants. They often conceived that they saw His Satanic Majesty, with all his distinguishing appendages, such as his cloven foot, his sooty aspect, his peculiar horns, and sulphurous odor. Although his visitations were most formidable in the shape of a woman, yet they frequently had the uncommon fortitude of sustaining long conversations with him. The more pious a monk was, the more frequently he was honored with the company of demons. This fact is not surprising, for it is certain that the more successfully he warred against nature and himself, the more diseased would become his brain, the more extravagant his conceptions, the more discordant his imagination, the more susceptible his senses to false impressions, the more frequent and terrible would apparitions appear, and the better he would be suited for the company of fiends and spirits. If in the vigorous and wholesome bustle of life, the visual organs may recognize images which have no real existence, the auditory, sounds which are imaginary, and the olfactory, odors which are the mere products of fancy, how much more vividly would analogous deceptions be likely to occur in the minds of monks and anchorites, whose condition was replete with causes calculated to create, them. Such was the melancholy condition of those monks, who, aspiring after superhuman sanctification, had with sincerity of purpose assumed the monastic obligation; But there were others who, more ambitious of fame than of internal purity, had assumed the same obligations. Professedly despising pleasure and fortune, but secretly laboring to acquire their possession, they manufactured with more facility diabolical apparitions, than those which spontaneously sprang from the overwrought brain of the sincere.