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DEVIL 



DEVIZES 



and of hell their residence, a place blazing with 

 eternal fire, and tilled with every horror the im- 

 agination could suggest. The belief in the 

 objective personality of Satan was complete in 

 the literahstic explanation of the ' descent into 

 hell,' and the release of the 'spirits in prison.' 

 It was a literal conquest over an enemy, although 

 by some it was explained almost as if due to 

 superior cunning rather than superior power. 



Exaggerated ideas of the devil's dangerous power 

 prevailed throughout the dark and middle ages, 

 whose deep melancholy faith and fantastic theory of 

 the universe generated saints naturally on the one 

 hand, and witches and sorcerers as naturally on the 

 other. It was an involuntary exercise of the poetic 

 faculty, through which the thoughts of their own 

 hearts and of their own time became spirits, which 

 they saw around them. Countless legends were 

 originated of actual contests between individual 

 saints and devils in one or other of a thousand 

 forms. Safety from the devil could be found 

 alone withiu the charmed ring-fence of the 

 church, fortified by the ordained sacraments and 

 by personal cleanness of life. Excommunica- 

 tion was synonymous with being ' delivered 

 over to Satan,' to whom the popular imagina- 

 tion transferred freely all the lingering rem- 

 nants of earlier demonologies, so that that 

 particular form and those particular attributes 

 became permanently associated with his appear- 

 ance which medieval art has fixed and handed 

 down to us. Lechery had ever been a persistent 

 quality of the devil (from the literal interpreta- 

 tion of Gen. vi. 2), and the popular imagination 

 working out this idea gave free play to a fearful 

 but prurient fancy, which revelled in multiplying 

 all the disgusting details of a witches' sabbath. 

 Throughout the middle ages the devil was an 

 absorbing idea, and the constant familiarity with 

 him often brought with it a penalty of contempt. 

 In the old religious plays a principal part was 

 usually cassigned to him, arid indeed he principally 

 represented the comic element, as may still be seen 

 in the pastorales of the Basques. The auditors 

 might laugh for the moment to see the devil out- 

 witted and then beaten, but they had not shaken 

 off that fear which revenged itself in all the piti- 

 less cruelties of witchcraft the darkest chapter 

 in the history of humanity. 



The decadence of belief in the active external 

 power of the devil was mainly due to the indirect 

 effect of the Reformation and the progress of 

 science. To no man was the devil ever more 

 present than to Luther, but nevertheless it was 

 mainly the movement he inaugurated that has 

 driven the enemy back into the sphere of the 

 abstract arid the ideal. In later generations the 

 sense of the supernatural has steadily decayed, 

 and with it almost all the terrors of the devil ; but 

 it cannot be said that with it has also disappeared 

 a genuine religious spirit. The Christian man in 

 the conscious weakness of his struggle against in- 

 dwelling sin feels that he has no need to conjure up 

 for himself an external suggester of temptation 

 he has devils enough in the treacherous inclina- 

 tions of his own heart. And in assuming a per- 

 sonal devil to account for the evil side that there 

 is in nature and in life, there remains the question 

 to be answered whether we have not merely pushed 

 back the most puzzling of all questions a single 

 stage, and whether we have contributed at all to 

 the insoluble problem of the genesis of evil. 



Kant (in 1793) defined the devil as the personifi- 

 cation of ' radical evil. ' Schleiermacher held that 

 symbolic reference to the devil might fitly have a 

 place in Christian discourse, but denied the possi- 

 bility of his real existence, and in this he has 

 been followed by Schenkel, Biedermann, Lipsius, 



Pfleiderer, and others. Pfleiderer, estimating the 

 critical result of the doctrine, finds that whilst a 

 twofold logical contradiction is involved in the idea 

 of devils as the substantial existence of wicked- 

 ness, and as supra-mundane creatures belonging to 

 this world devils represent the obverse of religious 

 idealism, or empirical world-existence in its hostility 

 to the Idea : in other words, the world on the side 

 of its opposition to God, or the working for itself 

 of finite and opposing existence as such, presenting 

 itself as the sum and substance of evil. That the 

 two forms of evil the natural and the spiritual or 

 moral stand in inward connection, and form a 

 universal ( and accordingly metaphysical ) power in 

 the world, is the truth contained in the idea of the 

 devil that has significance for the practice of wor- 

 ship. On the other hand the orthodox view is 

 maintained more or less definitely by Liicke, 

 Von Hofmann, Luthardt, Rothe, Julius Miiller, 

 Martensen, and Dorner, who holds that though 

 the doctrine cannot be completely constructed, it 

 yet forms part of a consistent whole, and is of 

 importance for the Christian, as distinguished from 

 the heathen and Jewish conception of evil, as well 

 as for the Christian life. See ATONEMENT, DEMON- 

 OLOGY, EVIL, EXORCISM, HELL, WITCHCRAFT ; also 

 Roskoff's admirable Geschichte des Teufels (1869). 



Devil-fish is a name used for the Octopus 

 (q.v.), also for the Angler (q.v.), and, in America, 

 for a gigantic species of ray ( Cephalopterus vani- 

 pyrus), with very large pectorals. Of the latter 

 a specimen was found in Delaware Bay, 17 feet 

 by 18 feet, and weighing 5 tons. 



Devil's Bit. See SCABIOUS. 



Devil's Bridge, a popular name in most 

 mountainous countries for bridges built over wild 

 chasms. The most notable are ( 1 ) a bridge over 

 the Reuss, in the Swiss canton of Uri, 1J mile W. 

 of Anderniatt, on the St Gothard Road, where the 

 river, 4593 feet above sea-level, forms a picturesque 

 cascade of 100 feet. The new granite structure, 

 built in 1830, spanning the stream with a single 

 arch of 26 feet, fell in in August 1888, and traffic 

 was for a time resumed on the old moss-grown 

 bridge 20 feet below, which witnessed some severe 

 fighting between the French and the Austrians and 

 Russians in 1799. (2) A double bridge in Cardigan- 

 shire (sometimes called Pont-y-Mynach), 10 miles 

 ESE. of Aberystwith, across a gorge, 114 feet deep, 

 and over a mile long, traversed by the Mynach, 

 which makes within a short distance four falls of 

 from 18 to 110 feet. The lower bridge was con- 

 structed by the monks of Strata Florida in the 

 llth century, the upper (20 feet over it) in 1753. 



Devil's Coach-horse ( Ocypus olens), a com- 

 mon British and European beetle, in the family 

 Staphylinidse. It has very much reduced wing- 

 covers, and resembles many of its relatives in the 

 habit of curving its posterior body upwards, using 

 the tip to adjust the wings under their covers. 



Devil's Dyke. See CAMBRIDGESHIRE. 



Devise, the conveyance of land by Will (q.v.). 



Devizes, a municipal borough of Wiltshire, 

 near the Kennet and Avon Canal, 50 miles 

 WSW. of Reading, and 20 ESE. of Bath. It lies 

 high at the mouth of Pewsey Vale, between the 

 thinly peopled tracts of Salisbury Plain and the 

 Marlborough Downs. According to Dr Guest, the 

 old name Divisce or Ad Divisas marked the ancient 

 boundary between the English and Celts ; anyhow, 

 as a town, Devizes owes its origin to a splendid 

 castle built here by Bishop Roger of Salisbury 

 about 1132. It was stormed by Cromwell in 1645, 

 and now is represented by mere fragments. There 

 are two churches with much interesting Norman 

 work ; a market-cross ( 1814), commemorating God's 



