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{{Style P-No indent|Father Sinistrari was by no means an obscure person in his own day; he enjoyed general esteem, and filled many important offices. Born in 1622, he was for fifteen years Professor of Theology at Pavia, and subsequently became Vicar-General of the diocese of Avignon, and theologian to the Archbishop of Milan, was attached to the tribunal of the Inquisition, and compiled a criminal code for the Franciscan Order, to which he himself belonged. He died in 1701.}}

 

To Father Sinistrari’s treatise may be added a more celebrated curiosity of diabolical literature, for the republication of which we are also indebted to M. Liseux. The ardent imagination of Luther, it is well known, led him to translate his spiritual conflicts into the language of material symbolism, and sometimes he did not accurately distinguish between the symbol and the reality. It is doubtful whether he may not have actually believed himself to have unsuccessfully defended the doctrine of the Mass against the fiend in the days of his orthodoxy; if this was not so, the disputation at least presented itself to his mind as an effective allegory, and he did not perceive that he was exposing himself to the reproach of having derived his arguments from the Devil. The weapon thus incautiously offered to opponents was grasped in the next century by the Abbe de Cordemoy, who republished Luther’s dialogue with a commentary to prove that the Reformer, on his own showing, forsook the Church at the instigation of Satan. The point is a perfectly fair one, and though neither Luther’s nor the Abbe’s ''jeu d’esprit'' is likely to have much influence on opinion in our day, each is well worth preserving as a literary curiosity. M. Liseux has translated Luther’s text into French, and the Abbe has involuntarily evinced his sense of the speciousness of the Devil’s arguments by accompanying them with brief controversial notes.