In St. Martin’s Church, Canterbury, the oldest in England, the sacristan shows visitors the site of an early English door on the south side, and a Norman doorway in the middle of the northern wall, both long since blocked up. Infants to be baptized were formerly brought into the church by the south entrance, and after the ceremony the north door was thrown open to permit the egress of evil spirits expelled by baptism. For in early times demons were believed to come from the north, where the habitations of the Norse gods were also thought to be. The pagans, when worshiping their deities, looked towards the north; but Christians engaged in prayer turned their faces eastward and lifted up their hands; they regarded the north as “the unblessed heathen quarter.” The unexplored Arctic regions, where night[220] reigned much of the time, were thought to belong especially to the Devil, or spirit of darkness;[221] and the same idea is conveyed in several passages of Holy Scripture, as, for example, in Jeremiah iv. 6: “I will bring evil from the north, and a great destruction.” In the Middle Ages the rose-windows in the north and south transepts of Lincoln Minster were called the two eyes of the cathedral, the former being known as the _Dean’s Eye_, ever on the watch against the attacks of Lucifer, who had his abode “in the sides of the north” (Isaiah xiv. 13); while the window in the south transept was called the _Bishop’s Eye_, “courting the influence of the Holy Spirit, of which the south wind was a type.” Apropos of evil spirits entering consecrated places, there is a quaint legend about a little stone figure yclept the _Lincoln Imp_, which is to be seen perched upon a corbel of a column on the north side of the Angel Choir of the same cathedral. According to one version of the legend, when Bishop Remigius came to Lincoln, in the year after the Norman Conquest, the Devil was sorely tried; for until that time he had had undisturbed control of affairs in the town and neighborhood. In vain the Evil One sought to hinder the completion of the church, and finally he waylaid the bishop outside the building and attempted to kill him. But the good bishop at this critical time called upon the Blessed Virgin Mary for assistance, and she sent a tempest of wind which so buffeted and distracted the Devil that he sought refuge inside the church, not daring to venture out because of the fierce wind, which prevails a good part of the time even nowadays, and which is still awaiting the Devil’s reappearance! The Bishop, we know, died long ago; The wind still waits, nor will he go Till he has a chance of beating his foe; But the Devil hopp’d up without a limp, And at once took shape as the Lincoln Imp. And there he sits atop the column, And grins at the people who gaze so solemn. Moreover, he mocks at the wind below, And says, “You may wait till doomsday, O!”[222]