passage as a piece of history. Neither Moses, nor any other scriptural
writer, professes to have been miraculously instructed in the events of
the antediluvian world; and if they make no such pretension themselves,
it is altogether gratuitous in us to make it for them. The slightest
consideration must convince us, that all _natural_ sources of
information respecting so primitive a period must have ceased to exist,
at least in any reliable form: and the earliest portions of the book of
Genesis have every characteristic of that beautiful mythical
composition, which is the first fruit of the literary activity of every
simple-hearted nation, and which mingles together in one texture,
tradition, fact, speculation, poetical conception, and moral truth. In
this instance, the writer seems to have been oppressed by the feeling,
that human peace and tranquillity were disturbed by the restless
aspirings and inquisitive ambition of the mind. If man could but be
content to take the good which God has spread within his easy reach, and
not permit himself to pry into the possibilities of having more, his
life might be spent as in a garden of the Lord, in the warmth of sunny
days, and the light sleep of unhaunted nights. But he cannot repress his
insatiable curiosity, his passion for the fruits of knowledge and
dignity, of which Providence has given him the idea, but which have been
set beyond his permitted reach; and this thirst of his nature he
resolves at all hazards to indulge; this godlike aspiration, imprisoned
in a frame to which it is unsuited, chafes against his quiet, and
abbreviates his days. Hence proceed the struggle and the toil of life;
the thistle and the thorn which he gathers from a soil that might have
yielded only flowers; hence, children are we all of care and sorrow;
hence, by the sweat of the hardy brow we must live, and soon fret down
existence into dust; not however, without our victory after all; for we
subjugate the earth, and reign thereon.
Observe too, that Adam rules the woman; and the woman has a heel upon
the serpent:—the last seduced is placed the highest; and the first
corrupter sinks into a reptile. Our temptations are _beneath_ us; and
having once detected them, we are to rule them ever after. Once let the
knowledge of good and evil be tasted, and the primitive equality of
things, which put man and beast upon a level, is destroyed; all beings
fall into the ranks of a moral gradation; and though none that have free
will may escape a fall, he that is last to yield shall be the first to
reign.
(2.) Neither then in the original account, nor in the scanty subsequent
notices of the transgression in Eden, is there any disclosure of a
Satanic existence. Let us rapidly follow down the course of Hebrew
literature, and search in it for the first and successive indications of
this belief. I have stated that the books of Moses are destitute of all
trace of such a conception; nor can any thing at all corresponding to
the popular idea of the Devil, be found in any part of the Old
Testament. The name itself never once occurs; and it would be a great
mistake to identify the Satan of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the Devil
of the Greek.[553] The Satan of the former has a very uncertain
personality. The name rather denotes an office, which any agent of
Providence might be appointed to fill, than a definite individual being.
Any person, performing the function of an accuser, or who prepares
matter for accusation, by seducing men into evil,—any one acting the
part of an adversary to another,—is called Satan. Thus David is called
Satan to the Philistines;[554] a certain captain named Rezon was Satan
to Israel;[555] the angel of Jehovah was Satan to Balaam;[556] nay, even
Paul uses this singular expression, “Hymeneus and Alexander, I have
delivered to Satan” (for what purpose, do you suppose), “_that they may
be taught not to blaspheme_.”[557] No doubt this idea, at first vague
and indefinite, gradually became individualized; and that which had been
an appellative, passed into a proper name, yet without ever wholly
losing its generic character.[558] At the commencement of the book of
Job occurs its most distinct and definite use. It is there applied, not
to a fallen Spirit, not to a repudiated subject of the celestial state,
but to an angel near the throne, to a recognized minister of the Supreme
Power, who appears in the courts above among “the Sons of God.” He is
represented as a general inspector and public prosecutor of the Divine
government over man; going to and fro over the earth, by heavenly
commission, to execute the probationary part of the great Ruler’s will,
and administer to mankind the severities which test their faith. In the
earlier Hebrew writings, this office is said to be filled by no
subordinate instrument: it is Jehovah himself who is represented as
trying his servants,—as the personal cause of their afflictions, and
author of their temptations. I recently heard the following passage from
the first book of Chronicles adduced in proof of the agency of Satan in
seducing men from their allegiance to God. “And Satan stood up against
Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.”[559] Now it so happens,
that this same event is recorded also in the much more ancient books of
Samuel, where it is thus introduced: “And again the anger of the Lord
was kindled against Israel, and HE moved David against them to say, ‘Go,
number Israel and Judah.’”[560] What can more clearly mark the natural
progress of opinion on this point? As the ideas of God became more
elevated and refined, it was felt to be scarcely compatible with his
perfections to seduce his children into violation of the duties he
himself required: and the imagination at least, if not the
understanding, was relieved by assigning that office, of hardening the
heart and tempting the will, (which originally had been left with
Jehovah himself,) to some interposing being, who might separate between
God and guilt.
When we open the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, we perceive a complete
change in this class of ideas. Even the latest written of the canonical
books introduce us to several angelic beings, unknown to the earlier
Scriptures,—as the Michael and Gabriel of Daniel. But in addition to
these, we find in the Jewish Apocrypha, for the first time, the matured
conception of the Prince of evil;[561] who is thenceforth represented in
the scarcely consistent relations of creature and enemy of the Most
High: and it is in this form that the notion presents itself to us in
the New Testament writings. Now what is the inference from these facts?
In the books of the ancient dispensation, this malignant Spirit does not
yet appear: in the writings of the new dispensation, he is
mentioned,—not as a novelty of revelation, but as long familiar to the
mind of every reader. The origin then of the belief in his existence,
must be sought between the close of the Hebrew inspiration and the
opening of the Christian. And what had happened in this interval? The
Jewish people had been in long and intimate relation with Persia:
connected with it by political ties, and united by the sympathies of
monotheism. The characteristic features of the Persian religion
were,—its doctrine of a Spirit of Evil in perpetual enmity to the
Supremely Good;—and its representation of a heavenly hierarchy, whose
spirits were ranged in ranks of angels and archangels, and received
their separate names. These ideas then naturally passed into the Jewish
mind, with little change; except that the Evil Spirit was reduced to a
somewhat lower station, in obedience to the stern Mosaic principle, of
the absolute Monarchy of God.[562] And as these notions became perfectly
engrafted on the national faith of Israel, the founders of Christianity
were educated in them; and they were permitted to appear by incidental
allusion, and in conformity with the general sentiments of the country
and the age, in the pages of history and correspondence, which the
evangelists and apostles have left. Nor can I perceive, either how it
can be proved, or why it should be desired, that God would annihilate
from the understanding of his inspired servants, all the harmless ideas,
foreign to their mission, which constituted the common stock of thought
at the time, and gave them points of necessary sympathy and intellectual
contact with the spirit of their generation. How slight the sanction
which they give to some, at least, of these mythological imaginations,
may be estimated by a single fact. The whole theory respecting fallen
angels rests upon two verses,[563] each in one of the most doubtful of
the New Testament writings: indeed the texts can scarcely be regarded as
constituting two independent authorities; for the latter is little else
than a repetition of the former; occurring in a portion of the second
epistle of Peter, which, strangely enough, contains, the sentiments and
even the language of a large part of the epistle of Jude. When such
evidence as this is brought forward, as conclusive and infallible, I
would respectfully ask our opponents, whether they seriously believe, on
the authority of the same epistle, that Michael the archangel disputed
with the Devil about the body of Moses? and as this is nowhere else
mentioned, whether an express and personal revelation of the fact was
imparted to St. Jude? If so, consistency would require them to maintain,
that this is one of the essential doctrines of the Gospel: for how much
soever our natural and corrupt reason might be tempted to think the
circumstance trivial, if true, it cannot really be otherwise than
fundamental, if privately and explicitly revealed.[564]
From the foregoing remarks, the general principles, in conformity with
which I would treat the question of demoniacal possessions, will be so
evident, that it will be unnecessary to enter into any details. The
precise relation to each other of the various orders of evil spirits in
which the Jews believed, it is not possible to define. It is certain,
however, that they made a distinction, which our common translation of
the Scriptures has improperly obliterated, between demons and devils.
The former were thought to be of only human rank, the souls of the
wicked dead: and it was these only that were supposed to possess and
afflict the bodies of the living. The latter were guilty angels, and had
no agency assigned to them on earth, being kept in durance within the
prisons of the unseen world. There was therefore the same difference
between demons and devils, as with us between ghosts and fiends. Of the
former, Beelzebub was considered as the chief; of the latter, Satan: and
whether these beings were regarded as standing in any definite relation
to each other, is uncertain; probably the Devil, as the Prince of
darkness, was believed to be the ruler of all the powers of evil,
whether human or angelic. Unlike his incarcerated compeers, Satan was
permitted to be at large, and to practise his arts against mankind: all
gentile kingdoms being absolutely his; and even the chosen people not
protected wholly from his malignity, at least until the Messiah’s reign,
which was to commence with his dethronement. It may be observed by any
careful reader of the gospels, that the evils of which he was held to be
the author, are not the same that are ascribed to Beelzebub and his
demons. Satan, and he only, was the moral seducer: and the physical
calamities proceeding from him were only natural and intelligible
diseases, regular enough to fall under the cognizance of science. The
demons had, on the contrary, no concern with the conscience; and
occasioned only the irregular and apparently preternatural maladies,
which science deserted and left to the tender mercies of
superstition;—of which epilepsy and insanity are the most remarkable
examples.
Of this system of notions the evangelists were doubtless possessed. But
that they held them on the tenure of unerring inspiration can by no
means be shown. On the contrary, the natural causes which produced them
can be so clearly detected in the prevalent sentiments of their age and
country, that not the slightest pretext remains for referring them to
express revelation. So far from requiring a miracle to excite these
conceptions, we must admit, that nothing less than a miracle could have
excluded them, familiar as they had been to the national mind from the
time of its intercourse with Persia. Had the founders of Christianity
never received any extraordinary mission, they would have entertained
the conception of demoniacal possession; and its hold upon their
thoughts must therefore be regarded as the result of natural
prepossession, not of supernatural communication. A notion whose human
origin can be distinctly traced,—which was shared by uninspired persons,
and existed in the authors of our religion in their uninspired
years,—has no claim to be considered as a part of Christianity, and is
as open to doubt and examination as any other opinion of antiquity. To
affirm that, were it not true, God must have blotted it from the mind of
his messengers, is not only to overbear evidence with assertion, but to
decide dogmatically on the obligations of Deity, and, with infinite
presumption, to dictate the fit measure of his gifts. Till it can be
shown, that inspiration is co-extensive with omniscience, it must remain
compatible with error.
The language of the Gospels then, respecting demoniacs, is not to be
regarded as a condescending accommodation to popular prejudice; but as a
genuine expression of the writers’ own state of mind. There is no reason
to doubt that the prevalent ideas were shared by the apostles
themselves. By these did they interpret the facts which they witnessed:
through the colouring of these, their minds beheld the miracles of
Christ, and their own: and at the suggestion of these arose the language
in which they have recorded the ministry of their Lord. All this has not
the smallest effect on the truth and soundness of their testimony. They
no doubt reported faithfully that which they _saw and heard_; only they
tell us something more, adding a few phrases, disclosing also what they
_thought_. Like all witnesses of simple mind, especially when telling
that which awakens their wonder and affection, they mix up their
statements of phenomena with notions of causation; and present us with a
composite register of sensible impressions and mental interpretations.
It should be our business, as we read, to call up before us the scene
described; to see for ourselves the things visible, and hear the things
audible, of which the record speaks; and we shall find that this effort
will usually make a perfect and easy separation between the real and the
merely ideal, between the permanent fact and the temporary explanation.
When, for example, it is said, that the _demons_ in a man possessed
_spake_ to Christ, of what are we to think? for what voice are we to
listen? where are the lips from which the utterance flows?—Certainly it
was from the organs of the poor _lunatic himself_ that the sound must
have proceeded: and modern language would describe this fact by saying,
that _he_ spake; and in thus believing we accept the whole _attestation_
of the historian.
(3.) The same principle must be applied to the temptation of Christ. No
hint whatever is given, implying any visible appearance communing with
Jesus; nor need we even suppose any audible voice addressing him.[565]
The Evil Spirit, like God himself, was held to be invisible, and
inappreciable by any human senses: and when _words_ are attributed to
him, they represent only the dialogue which he is supposed to hold with
the silent and tempted heart. His whole guilty transactions indeed
belonged, it was imagined, to the region of the mind; and his was a
viewless and speechless wrestling with conscience on its throne.
Whenever therefore the seductive assaults of Satan are recorded, the
real fact described is this; that internal moral conflicts have been
going on, and deluding thoughts have been passing, like the shadow of a
dark Spirit, across the purer soul. And in such case, the first and the
only thing of which our consciousness can be aware, is, the occurrence
of these thoughts. To their antecedent source, our testimony cannot
reach; and whether they are precipitated on us by some enemy from
without, or are of spontaneous origin within our own minds, is a point
accessible indeed to speculation, but beyond the contact of experience.
Till they enter our nature, and so become a part of our personality,
they are nothing and nowhere: and when they enter and we feel their
torment, they are ours and no other being’s. No one ever sees, hears, or
feels, the Devil; he _perceives_ simply the intrusion of sinful ideas,
and _supposes_ them to be the result of diabolic power. He experiences
the temptation in reality; and refers it to the tempter in idea. And
were this not true of Christ, as of ourselves, it would be false to say,
that he “was tempted in all points as we are.” The temptation of our
Lord then, stripped of the dress which the historians have thrown around
the central facts, was the natural struggle, by which he exchanged the
imperfect, and local, and ambitious conceptions of the Messiah, which
his cottage training in Nazareth had imparted,—for that pure, and
self-sacrificing, and comprehensive interpretation of the office, which
broke upon his solitude so awfully. That he learned, at Mary’s knees, to
cherish the common hope of his nation, in the form under which it
prevailed among the peasantry, appears as little doubtful, as that he
caught the language of his native fields. Yet it is certain that this
early vision passed away; and that when he himself was called to fill
the appointed office, he acted out a conception quite opposite to the
dreams imparted to his childhood. Once he had mused on the widening
glory of Judæa; but he ended with announcing the prospect of its fall.
Once he had exulted in the dignity and power of the coming messenger,
who should break the oppression of his people, and set forth anew the
triumph of their ancient Providence: he declared himself at length the
meek prophet of penury, and woe and childhood. Once he had thought of
what Jerusalem would be, when the temple should be the centre of the
world’s homage, and multitudes of all nations should throng its
pavement, and its incense should rise in the pride of freedom, and its
hymn spring upward on the wing of happy melody: but ere his work of life
was finished, he taught a lowlier yet sublimer expectation, not of the
compression of the world into the Hebrew worship,—but of the diffusion
of that worship to cover the world; and revealed that secret shrine in
every human heart, where emotions, purer than incense, may burn for
ever, and tones sweeter than music be for ever breathed. This revolution
of sentiment, this conflict, by which new thoughts of inspiration
expelled the old ones inherited from education and reputed prophecy,
constituted the temptation in the wilderness; nor was it possible that
ideas the most divine, should thus burst the shell of custom and
tradition, without a convulsion truly terrible. It would be easy, were
it not irrelevant, to show how this hidden colloquy between the national
prepossessions and the personal intuitions of our Lord’s mind, would
give rise to the separate scenes of which the temptation is said to have
been composed. Possibly, however, the history, as it stands, is not the
record of a single event, to which a fixed date can be assigned in his
ministry: more probably, it gathers into one view a series of mental
conflicts, distributed over his whole public life; the struggles between
the accidental and the essential portions of his nature; between the
national and the human: between an historical imagination trained amid
the gorgeousness of prophecy, and a heavenly conscience dwelling with
the simplicity of God; between the conventional and the spiritual;
between, in short, the superinduced faith contracted from time and
place, and the inborn faith of a soul divine and free.
In the preceding notices of Scripture, no sanction is given to the
interpretations, if such there be, which resolve Satan into a
personification, treat the temptation as a vision or an allegory, and
identify the demoniac phraseology with the common language of
pathological description. I believe, indeed, that, wherever the Devil
and his agency are named, the only _real fact_ denoted is, the
occurrence to some one of a moral temptation: and that, wherever demons
are said to have been cast out, the only _historical event_ described
is, the cure of some physical or mental disease. But it appears to me
absurd to deny, that the writers meant more than this; to doubt that
they held the popular theory of such facts, and blended it naturally
with their record; that they were sincerely under the influence of the
existing system of demonology, and referred the seductions of sin to the
personal activity of the malignant Spirit. Nowhere, however, do they
pretend to set forth these ideas as gifts of preternatural revelation,
but simply take them up as part of the common media of thought belonging
to the age, and use them as the incidental colouring to their narrative
of facts. In different parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, as we have seen,
very different, and even inconsistent notions respecting the origin of
evil prevail: the conception of a powerful diabolic agent underwent a
regular and natural development: and the system of pneumatology apparent
in the Greek Scriptures is traceable to a foreign origin in an
uninspired age. Hence we must conclude, that respecting the origin of
evil, nothing doctrinal is specially revealed; that even in Palestine,
the human mind has been left to grapple with this great problem by its
own natural forces; and that we rise from the page of Scripture, as from
the speculations of wisdom and genius, with the difficulty yet unsolved.
By no means, then, can we attain to any theoretical certainty, or
logical consistency of belief, on this great topic. Revelation is
silent, and philosophy perplexed; and the controversy between the
Religion of Conscience and the Religion of the Understanding, is
undecided still. Let the framers of systems say what they will, the
thing is deeper than our minds, and what can we know? Nothing remains,
but to abandon hopelessly the speculative point of view, and treat the
matter as an object, not of knowledge, but of trust; to regard it as a
question to be decided by its bearings on duty, rather than its
materials for debate. Whenever the means of attaining to objective truth
do not exist, we can but rest in those views of things which most
entirely accord with our best nature. If we cannot tell what is true of
God, we yet may judge what is fittest for ourselves; what state of mind,
what modes of thought, prepare us best for the work of life; what mental
representation of existence most nobly sustains those fundamental moral
convictions, which it is the end of Christianity to fix in our implicit
faith and constant practice. To this arbitration we must submit our
present doubts respecting the source of evil; and, while waiting to
reach the realities of reason denied us now, accept, as our best truth,
the conceptions which are most just to our moral nature and relations.
III. Let us then, for final decision, consult the practical spirit of
Christianity, and ascertain to what view of the origin of sin it awards
the preference. Is it well, for the consciences and characters of men,
to consider God,—either directly or through his dependant Satan,—either
by his general laws, or by vitiating the constitution of our first
parents,—as the primary source of moral evil? _or_, on the contrary, to
regard it as, in no sense whatever, willed by the Supreme Mind, and
absolutely inimical to his Providence? Are we most in harmony with the
characteristic spirit of the gospel, when we call sin his instrument, or
when we call it his enemy? For myself, I can never sit at the feet of
Jesus, and yield up a reverential heart to his great lessons, without
casting myself on the persuasion, that God and evil are everlasting
foes; that never, and for no end, did he create it; that his will is
utterly against it, nor ever touches it, but with annihilating force.
Any other view appears to be injurious to the characteristic sentiments,
and at variance with the distinguishing genius, of Christian morality.