Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...term Protestant has been made to stand for something shameful and dangerous. A pamphlet recently published by a Catholic organization, with the Church's imprimatur, denned Protestantism as a "means invented by a monk named Luther to marry a nun" and as a "diabolical sect invented by the devil...
...Devil also became the butt of some of the first fine sallies of Yankee humor. One of them is an ancestor of a long posterity of country-bumpkin v. city-slicker witsnappers that pass current to this...
...tell you, son," one early Bostonian informed "an honest, ingenious countryman" with pompous condescension, "the Devil is dead...
...Devil's Children. The colonists had plenty else to concern them besides the Indians. In New England, especially, the Devil made trouble. "Exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small black man," says that great theological gossip, Cotton Mather, the fiend "decoyed a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious, and malicious creatures to lift themselves in his horrid service...
Though he can draw like Raphael when he likes, he much prefers to voyage off to worlds that never were, and to return from them with his own devil-may-care impressions. To his admirers he is a restless, inventive, original genius. To his critics, including some of the other topnotchers in the school of Paris, he is a talented mountebank and irrepressible showman who has lured his followers and the world up a blind artistic and intellectual alley...