ABSTRACT
In the early years of the seventeenth century, John Welsh, son-in-law of John Knox and a remarkably pious man by all accounts, stood before his congregation at Ayr. He looked into the faces before him, some of whom he must have baptized or married, and some that he might soon bury, and warned them all of an indefatigable adversary.1 ‘He is called Satan’, Welsh said, and ‘nothing can quench his thirst but the pulling off Christ’s crown off his head, and pouring out the blood of the souls of men and women, and the casting them in the everlasting fire of hell, that they may be burnt eternally’.2 Lest his audience feel safe or sheltered by their faith, he assured them that the Devil ‘will not spare thee, for as all the monstrous beasts on earth are not able to express his cruelty of nature, therefore he is compared to a wolf, to a lion, to a dragon, to that mighty leviathan’.3 In the constant quest to preserve and further the Reformation, such admonitions about Satan proved indispensable to Scottish ministers who strove to inspire the necessary combination of wariness and zeal in their listening and reading audiences.
