powerful rhetorical performance. To express his scorn for demonology, Ady deploys an informal style, developed from Scot's use of ridicule. Ady writes in a confrontational way: This doctrine of the unlimited power of Devils in naturals, thus by Christians entertained, is the highest and most abominable Apostacy, that ever was or can be in respect of Christ. (Chapter V) I Will not absolutely, positively, and definitively say it of Demonologers, That they worship the Devil directly ... Let Demonologers look out, abroad, round; but let them look home inward, and to themselves too: I fear they may find those abominable Idolators nearer home, than where they look for them. They are not simple or gross Idolators, such as worship wood and stone ... a finer, purer, neater, sprucer sort of Christians, Protestants or Papists (Angelicks as they would be thought) may take themselves by the Nose, and say, we are the Men. Is there any reason, ground, motive or hint, to fasten this to any but them? One Apostle saith, In the latter times, some will obstinately worship Devils, That will be the great villany in the latter age; The other saith, They will give heed to the doctrine of Devils: Put both together and this is the result, They that give heed to the doctrine of Devils, are the great Apostates, and obstinate worshippers of the Devil, which is the worst and most abominable Idolatry of the latter times, or ever was in any time. (Chapter XIX) Ady is indignant that demonology makes Satan a 'greater Miracler' (in 'To the Reader') than Christ. He argues flatly against demonic possession: passages in the New Testament where Christ drives out devils from possessed people are represented by Ady as the way the gospel writers described Christ healing the mad. Nor will he have the 'hypostatical union' of godhead and human nature easily reproduced by devils combining their nature with that of a human being. For Ady, the witch hunt is: Bloody, Barbarous, Cruel and Murtherous Opinion, an Opinion that Butchers up Men and Women without Fear or Wit, Sense or Reason, Care or Conscience, by droves; So many in Somerset, so many in Lancashire---so many in another County, Ten, Twenty, Thirty at a clap (Chapter XXIV) Ady insists on the fictiveness of demonology: 'this Babel of Confusion, is built merely upon the Sandy Foundation of Tales and Fables' (Chapter XXVIII). It