The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust'
and performs incantations for the purpose of summoning the devil. After all kinds of fearful apparitions and noises, by which Faust is almost terrified to death, a demon appears in the shape of a 'grey monk.' Faust invites him to visit him at his house in Wittenberg. The demon visits him there and tells him of all the horrors of hell. But Faust persists in his plan and makes a second rendezvous with the demon, who has now procured leave from his lord and master Lucifer to offer his services and attendance. The compact is made. The demon is to serve him for twenty-four years. Faust is to renounce Christianity and to hate all Christians, and at the end of twenty-four years he is to belong to the demon 'to have power, rule and dominion over his soul,

   body, flesh, blood, and possessions, and that for all eternity.' This compact has to be signed with blood. Faust pierces his hand, and the blood flows out and forms the words 'O homo fuge!'—'O man, escape!'—but Faust, though alarmed, is not deterred. It is now agreed that the demon shall appear, whenever summoned, in the form of a Franciscan monk. He then reveals his name: Mephistopheles, or, as the old legend gives it, Meph

    o

   stoph

    i

   les—the meaning of which is probably 'not loving the light'—

    μὴ ϕῶϛ φιλῶν

   —a compound which you may rightly remark must have been concocted by a rather second-rate Greek scholar.

   After a season of dissipation, during which Faust is supplied with all the luxuries that he desires—wine stolen from ducal, electoral, and episcopal cellars, soft and costly raiment from the draperies and naperies of Nürnberg and Frankfurt and so on (he had, for instance, only to open his window and call any bird, goose, turkey, or capon, and it would at once fly in, ready roasted)—getting tired of this kind of thing he falls in love and wishes to marry. But Mephisto angrily tells him that marriage is a thing pleasing to God and against the terms of

   the compact. You will notice here the Lutheran and anti-papal tendency—marriage being a thing pleasing to God in itself, and any compact being devilish which forbade it, as in the case of priests and monks.

   Then follow long discussions and disputations between Faust and Mephisto on the creation of the world, on hell and heaven, and on black art and 
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