THE reader will not fail to notice, that the personage known by the name
of the Devil, Satan, &c., is treated of more fully than any other
recorded in the Old or New Testament. The reason is, because his
influence exceeds that of all the prophets, and even of the Saviour
himself. So destructive has been his supposed reign, throughout the
earth, that hundreds of volumes could be written, and still the half
would remain untold. In the conclusion of this chapter, an account will
be given of witchcraft in Sweden, which far exceeds any thing on record.
The bare recital fills the mind with horror, pity, and indignation.
Before giving the dreadful tale, it will not be amiss to indulge in a
few thoughts on the probable origin of the existence of a Being who has
been a terror to all nations, both learned and ignorant. As the writer
is convinced that every thing pertaining to theology is of man's
creation, it may be useful to express his opinions how it has happened
that all religions have been based on two beings who have ever been
opposed to each other, namely, a God and a Devil. Their opposition to
each other is the ground-work of every system, whether it be of saint or
savage.
To attempt to go back to the origin of theology, as to when or where it
first assumed the form of religious worship, is to begin at the
beginning of the human race. Religion may be compared to a chain, the
first link of which is hidden in the darkness of past ages. The curtain
is continually dropping; and the most that we can do is, to peep behind
one of its comers. We find ourselves connected with that link which we
call Christianity. How many preceding links there may have been, we know
not, nor have we any means of knowing. All, therefore, is but
conjecture. But carrying our ideas back to a time we know not when, to
the beginning of that theology, the basis of which is a God and Devil
opposing each other, the following memories are presented:--Before human
beings were acquainted with the laws of nature, the universe must have
presented to them appearances which surprised and alarmed them.
Receiving no ideas but through the medium of the senses, the first idea
which must strike them would be, the great contrast between a mighty
power and their own weakness. They would discover from what they saw
around them, a mighty power which no prudence could guard against, and
which no strength, which they had, could oppose. They would see, that,
if by accident, they fell into water, it would destroy life; if, by any
means, their dwellings took fire, it would consume them; that thunder
was calculated to alarm them, and that death, often followed the storm;
and also, that the slightest accident often caused severe pain, and
sickness followed, without their being acquainted with the original
cause of all these evils. The first men, then, must have been astonished
with the mighty power which every where surrounded them, when compared
with their own weakness. Sometimes tasting the sweets of life, and at
others, its evils, the first gave them pleasing sensations, the last,
pain and distress. Having, then, nothing to guide them in drawing
conclusions but the objects by which they were surrounded, they inferred
that the mighty power which was every moment visible to their senses,
and from which they received every thing that contributed to their
happiness, resided in a being like themselves, but possessing wisdom and
goodness.
To these children of nature, who saw "God in the clouds, and heard him
in the wind," by a simple process of the mind, such conclusions were
very natural. The first theologians, then, who, by way of reasoning, we
place at the fountain head of all religious systems which have come down
to us, were convinced of the existence of a Supreme Power who governed
the destinies of the human race. Power, then, was the first idea which
man had, in the infancy of his rea-son, as to the existence of a God;
and it is all that the great-est and wisest of the human race have ever
discovered of the Being called by that name. And in this view of the
subject, there is no man living who is an Atheist. The power that
presented itself to untaught man, required no laborious investigation to
discover. It struck his senses with as equal a force as it does the
profoundest philosopher. On the contrary, the wisdom and goodness
ascribed to God, resulted from a knowledge of the order and wonderful
adaptation which pervades the universe, the investigation of which has
employed master minds in all subsequent ages.
But untutored man must be overwhelmed with thinking of that power to
whose bounds he could set no limits. The wisdom and munificence that run
through all nature, were to him unknown. To those, therefore, from whom
theology took its rise, it was a world of confusion. Ignorant of cause
and effect in the order of nature, and their imaginations being active,
while their reasoning powers were undeveloped, every thing they saw or
felt was to them a mixture of pleasurable or painful sensations. The
pleasure, ease, or comfort which they enjoyed, would be considered as
the gift of a good power which conferred such blessings. On the other
hand, it would appear inconsistent to them to ascribe the evils
attending them to the author of good, they being incapable of judging
that good (pleasure) and evil (pain) could proceed from the same power.
In reasoning from what they saw, they concluded that power was connected
with, and resided in, living beings, who had life and motion like
themselves. Hence they inferred, that the power from whom they received
good, existed somewhere to them unknown. Proceeding in the same track in
which they, in imagination, first set out, they conceived this power to
be a Being whose residence was in the starry heavens. Untaught man,
having imagined a Being from whom he received all the good, in following
on in the same course soon came to the certain conclusion that the God
who was the author of all his happiness, must have a location, a
dwelling above, in some of the stars--at any rate, beyond the ken of
mortals. As men's thinking powers became move expanded, but still under
the influence of imagination, they would conclude that this Being who
dwelt in the skies, would, of course, have his attendants who fulfilled
his orders, and added splendor to his habitation.
It appears, that by such a train of thinking, under the influence of the
imagination, that the religious system which has come down to us, and
which, from time to time, has had additions and modifications, namely,
the existence of a God and of a place called Heaven, inhabited by
angels, had its origin. Ignorant of the laws of nature, the power of
imagination has produced, owing to the organization of the human mind, a
world of fiction, consisting of a God, angels, and a habitation in the
skies. By the same process of reasoning, (though feeble,) yet propelled
by an active imagination, which had fixed the habitation of a good Being
in the skies, in a splendid city, with attendants singing his praises,
and eager to execute his orders, untaught man now turned hi# attention
to the author of his misfortunes and misery. Being totally ignorant that
a portion of pain was indispensable to the full enjoyment of happiness
in his precarious life, he could not think that pleasure and pain
proceeded from the same being; which must have induced him to conclude
that an evil and malignant being existed, nearly equal in power to the
one that was good; and to such an one, he ascribed all pain and
misfortune.
Here, then, are all the materials for a system of theology which has
been propagated and believed in by every nation under heaven, in which
have been included "saint, savage, and sage." In all the hundreds of
systems of religious worship, the before-mentioned materials have been
the ground-work, with the exception of the Jewish; for, during their
dispensation, the Devil made no part of it. But when Jesus came to
gather up "_the lost sheep of the house of Israel,_" along came Mr.
Devil to oppose him. As the imagination had created a Devil, the Father
of all evil, something was still wanting to complete the whole; and that
was, an abode of darkness and horror. Hell, then, is his dread mansion,
over which he reigns triumphant.
It has been reserved for the Christian Religion to depict hell in all
its awful terrors. The New Testament represents hell as a place of
torment by fire never-ending, where the unfortunate occupants are
forever burning, but kept alive, and never consumed. The hell of the
Greeks and other nations is less horrible, being represented as the
abode of darkness, humiliation, and sorrow. But Christianity has a God
in heaven, and a Devil in hell, forever contending with each other, like
gladiators of old for the prize; and that prize is the human race. But
the same New Testament represents that the Devil will have by far the
greatest number of prisoners, so that, in the final winding up of this
holy war, _Old Nick_ will win the field.
The same process of reasoning, which led man, in the infancy of his
reason, to personify the power who presided over the human race, induced
him to infer that his pain and misfortune emanated from a malignant
being, who delighted to do him harm. He then, by the simple process of
his imagination, concluded that there must be two opposing powers which
governed the affairs of mortals. The good, proceeded from a being who
showered down blessings on mortals; and all evil and pain, from a being
who took pleasure in the unhappiness of the human race; and his
residence, to correspond with his evil disposition, was by them fixed in
the gloomy regions of darkness and horror. This, then, Christians,
appears to have been the origin of your God and Heaven; and also your
Devil and Hell. That both heaven and hell are of heathen origin, there
can be no doubt; and it is also equally clear, that the Jews, when they
returned from captivity, brought these doctrines back with them into
Judea. They then made part of the Jewish faith, and Jesus embraced them;
for he pretended to cast out devils, and the Devil enticed him in the
wilderness to rebel against God and enlist into the service of his
Satanic Majesty. And this heaven, which originated in heathenism, Jesus
promised as the reward of his faithful followers; and with this very
hell he threatened the disobedient.
What can Christians say (after this) of the divinity or the antiquity of
the New Testament? Its doctrines originated in an age unknown, among a
people more ancient than Moses, or than Adam, who is said to have been
the first man. Yes! ye ministers of grace, your heaven and hell, by the
proclaiming of which you alarm the good man, but make the wicked man
worse, have no more existence in reality than the heaven and hell of
Mahomet. But if there be a heaven, such as you preach up, and the road
to it be as difficult as Jesus declared it to be, many of you will have
to put up at the half-way house; you will never reach the end of your
journey.
The following account of witchcraft in Sweden, is extracted from
"Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers:"--"The story of witchcraft, as it
is reported to have passed in Sweden, in the year 1670, and has many
times been reprinted in this country, (England,) is, on several
accounts, one of the most interesting and deplorable that has ever been
recorded. The scene lies in Dalecarlia, a country forever memorable as
having witnessed some of the earliest adventures of Gustavus Vasa, his
deepest humiliation, and the first commencement of his prosperous
fortune. The Dalecarlians are represented to us as the simplest, the
most faithful, and the bravest of the sons of men;--men, undebauched and
unsuspicious, but who devoted themselves in the most disinterested
manner for a cause that appeared to them worthy of support, the cause of
liberty and independence against the cruellest of tyrants. At least,
such they were in 1520, one hundred and fifty years before the date of
the story we are going to recount. The site of these events was at Mohra
and Elfdale, in the province that has just been mentioned. The
Dalecarlians, simple and ignorant, but of exemplary integrity and
honesty, who dwelt amid impracticably mountains and spacious mines of
copper and iron, were distinguished for superstition among the countries
of the north, where all were superstitious. They were probably subject,
at intervals, to the periodical visitation of alarms of witches, when
whole races of men became wild with the infection, without any one's
being able to account for it.
"In the year 1670, and one or two preceding years, there was a great
alarm of witches in the town of Mohra. There were always two or three
witches existing in some of the obscure quarters of this place; but now
they increased in number, and showed their faces with the utmost
audacity. Their mode, on the present occasion, was, to make a journey
through the air to Blockula, an imaginary scene of retirement, which
none but the witches and their dupes had ever seen. Here they met with
feasts and various entertainments, which it seems had particular charms
for the persons who partook of them. The witches used to go into a
field, in the environs of Mohra, and cry aloud to the Devil in a
peculiar sort of recitation, "_Antecessor! come and carry us to
Blockula._" Then appeared a multitude of strange beasts: men, spits,
posts, and goats with spits run through their entrails, and projecting
behind, that all might have room. The witches mounted these beasts of
burden, as vehicles, and were conveyed through the air over high walls
and mountains, and through churches and chimneys, without perceptible
impediment, till they arrived at the place of their destination.
"Here the Devil feasted them with various compounds and confections;
and, having feasted to their heart's content, they danced and then
fought. The Devil made them ride on spits, from which they were thrown;
and the Devil beat them with the spits and laughed at them. He then
caused them to build a house to protect them against the day of
judgment, and presently overturned the walls of the house, and derided
them again. All sorts of obscenities were reported to follow upon these
scenes. The Devil begot on the witches sons and daughters; this new
generation intermarried again, and the issue of this further conjunction
appears to have been toads and serpents. How all this pedigree
proceeded, in the two or three years in which Blockula had never been
heard of, I know not that the witches were ever called on to explain.
But what was most of all to be deplored, the Devil was not content with
seducing the witches to go and celebrate this infernal Sabbath; he
further insisted that they should bring the children of Mohra along with
them.
"At first, he was satisfied, if each witch brought one: but now, he
demanded that each witch should bring six or seven for her quota. How
the witches managed with the minds of the children, we are at a loss to
guess. These poor, harmless innocents, steeped to the very lips in
ignorance and superstition, were, by some means, kept in continual alarm
by the wicked, or, to speak more truly, the insane old women, and said
as their prompters said. It does not appear that the children ever left
their beds, at the time they reported they had been to Blockula. Their
parents watched them with fearful anxiety. At a certain time of the
night, the children were seized with a strange shuddering; their limbs
were agitated, and their skins covered with a profuse perspiration. When
they came to themselves, they related that they had been to Blockula,
and the strange things they had seen, similar to what had already been
described by the women. Three hundred children, of various ages, are
said to have been seized with this epidemic.
"The whole town of Mohra became subject to the infection, and were
overcome with the deepest affliction. They consulted together, and drew
up a petition to the royal counsel at Stockholm, entreating that they
would discover some remedy, and that the government would interpose its
authority to put an end to a calamity to which otherwise they could find
no limit. The King of Sweden, at that time, was Charles the Eleventh,
father of Charles the Twelfth, and was only fourteen years of age. His
council, in their wisdom, deputed two commissioners to Morah, and
furnished them with powers to examine witnesses, and take whatever
proceedings they might judge necessary to put an end to so unspeakable a
calamity. They entered on the business of their commission, on the
thirteenth of August, the ceremony having been begun with two sermons in
the great church of Mohra, in which we may be sure the damnable sin of
witchcraft was fully dilated on, and concluded with prayers to Almighty
God, that, in his mercy, he would speedily bring to an end the
tremendous misfortune with which, for their sins, he had seen fit to
afflict the poor people of Mohra. The next day they opened their
commission. Seventy witches were brought before them. They were all, at
first, steadfast in their denial, alleging that the charges were
wantonly brought against them, solely from malice and ill-will. But the
judges were earnest in pressing them, till, at length, first one, and
then another, burst into tears, and confessed all. Twenty-three were
prevailed on thus to disburden their consciences; but nearly the whole,
those who owned the justice of their sentence, as well as those who
protested their innocence to the last, were executed. Fifteen children
confessed their guilt, and were also executed. Thirty-six other
children, (who, we may infer, did confess,) between the ages of nine and
sixteen, were condemned to run the gauntlet, and to be whipped on their
hands at the church door every Sunday for a year together. Twenty others
were whipped on their hands for three Sundays."
This is certainly a very deplorable scene; and is made the more so, by
the previous character which history has imposed on us, of the
simplicity, integrity, and generous love of liberty of the Dalecarlians.
For the children and their parents, we can feel nothing but unmingled
pity. The case of the witches is different. That three hundred children
should have been made the victims of this imaginary witchcraft, is
doubtless a grievous calamity. And that a number of women should be
found, so depraved and so barbarous, as by their incessant suggestions
to have practised on the minds of these children, so as to have robbed
them of their sober sense, to have frightened them into fits and
disease, and made them believe the most odious impossibilities, argued a
most degenerate character, and well merited severe reprobation, but not
death. Add to which, many of those women may be believed innocent;
otherwise, a great majority of those who were executed would not have
died protesting their entire freedom from what was imputed to them. Some
of the parents, no doubt from folly and ill-judgment, aided the
alienation of mind in their children, which they afterward so deeply
deplored, and gratified their senseless aversion to the old women, when
they were themselves in many cases more the real authors of the evil
than those who suffered.
The honest and serious reader is now recommended to pause, and, for a
moment, reflect on the foregoing recital; for if ten thousand real
devils had been let loose and turned out on the earth in a visible and
bodily form, and had been permitted to do their worst against the human
race, if such a thing had actually taken place, the evils inflicted by
them would have been little compared to what has really taken place by
men's believing in the existence of an invisible Devil, who never had a
being but in the imagination of mortals. The destructive influence which
has spread over the whole earth has brought to a premature grave
thousands and tens of thousands of harmless beings, who have been
charged with holding converse with this supposed enemy of God and man.
Of all the crimes which have been committed on earth, to sin against
Orthodox faith has been considered the worst; when, in fact, it is no
sin at all. There is nothing immoral in it. To differ from any man, or
from all men, about religion, cannot be a crime. It is the inherent
right of every human being; and to rob him of that right is the worst of
felony. But to punish a man with death in addition, is to unite robbery
and murder. And what makes it worse is, that religious offenders are put
to death without pity or mercy. Few, very few tears of compassion ever
have fallen for them, where Christianity has been the prosecutor.
The baneful influence which has spread over the world, by believing in
the existence of the Devil, is shocking to humanity. It has been
computed that as many as one million persons have suffered, in various
ways, since the commencement of the Christian era. Some have been
banished; some have been branded and imprisoned; others put to death,
after having been tortured in the most cruel manner; and thousands have
been out-lawed and driven from their peaceful homes without pity. All
this has taken place because the Scriptures teach and support the
existence of a Devil, the inveterate enemy of God and men. There is no
doctrine more fully carried out in the New Testament than the existence
and hostile activity of the Devil. Jesus, it is said, "_cast them out._"
He also was tempted to rebel against God, and to worship the Devil. In
the Book of Job, the Devil is represented as being permitted to afflict
Job. And Jesus threatens the ungodly with a punishment in connection
with the Devil and his angels. If a devil has no being whatever, why
should Jesus pretend to cast out devils? And if there be, in truth, such
a personage as the Devil, possessing such power, and, also, forever
opposing Almighty power, can it be possible that a God of goodness would
permit him to live and annoy God and men?
We see that it is the height of folly to suppose that such a personage
ever did live, or does now; but the belief of it has been one of the
greatest curses which ever befel mankind. Here, then, let us bring up
the idea, and reflect upon it, that all the evil which has taken place,
and all the sufferings endured by the unfortunate beings in the dark
ages, may possibly again occur. The Bible is the same, and mam is the
same. The difference is in the actions of men in different ages. When
reason and the morality of things are man's guide, then he is peaceable
and humane; but when acting under the imagination, he is capable of
becoming as bad as is the Devil.
In concluding this chapter, let us look back to those times of ignorance
and superstition. Let us place ourselves by the misortunate victims who
were put to torture and death for a crime they could not commit. Could
they, in their extreme pain, but have had a hope that a day would arrive
when a band of master spirits would arise on the shores of the Atlantic,
who, by reason and the moral fitness of things, would upset and
prostrate the systems under which they so severely suffered---could the
poor, suffering victim, with his broken heart and fractured limbs, have
had assurance, when his tortured mind was about to quit its lacerated
boundary, that a time would soon surely come when the truth of the Bible
and the existence of a Devil would cease to be made the instruments of
unspeakable misery and torment, it would have been a cheerful ray of
comfort amid the devouring flame. The time _has_ at length arrived, and
we ought to improve it. Let us, then, with untiring perseverance and
moral courage, give the death-blow to the Divinity of the Old and New
Testaments, and thereby forever obliterate, not only the incentives to,
but also the remembrance of all religious persecutions.