"We will go into the provinces, you will answer; we skill be fed by the lords of the land, by the farmers, by the curates. Do not flatter yourselves, my dear brethren, that you shall eat at their tables; they have for the most part enough to do to feed themselves, notwithstanding the 'Method of Rapidly Getting Rich by Agriculture' and fifty other works of the same kind, published every day at Paris for the use of the people in the country, with the cultivation of which the authors never had anything to do. "I behold among you young men of some talent, who say that they will make verses, that they will write pamphlets, like Chisiac, Normotte, or Patouillet; that they will work for the _'Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques'_ that they will write sheets for Fréron, funeral orations for bishops, songs for the comic opera. Any of these would at least be an occupation. When a man is writing for the _'Année Littéraire,'_ he is not robbing on the highway, he is only robbing his creditors. But do better, my dear brethren in Jesus Christ--my dear beggars, who, by passing your lives in asking charity, run the risk of the galleys; do better; enter one of the four mendicant orders; you will then be not only rich, but honored also." BEKKER, "THE WORLD BEWITCHED," THE DEVIL, THE BOOK OF ENOCH, AND SORCERERS. This Balthazar Bekker, a very good man, a great enemy of the everlasting hell and the devil, and a still greater of precision, made a great deal of noise in his time by his great book, "The World Bewitched." One Jacques-George de Chaufepied, a pretended continuator of Bayle, assures us that Bekker learned Greek at Gascoigne. Niceron has good reasons for believing that it was at Franeker. This historical point has occasioned much doubt and trouble at court. The fact is that in the time of Bekker, a minister of the Holy Gospel--as they say in Holland--the devil was still in prodigious credit among divines of all sorts in the middle of the seventeenth century, in spite of the good spirits which were beginning to enlighten the world. Witchcraft, possessions, and everything else attached to that fine divinity, were in vogue throughout Europe and frequently had fatal results.