IX AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY 323 



a larger share of the attention of the Fathers. 

 It is the devil who instigates the Roman authori- 

 ties to persecute ; the gods and goddesses of 

 paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an 

 invention of Satan ; if a saint falls away from 

 grace, it is by the seduction of the demon ; if 

 heresy arises, the devil has suggested it ; and 

 some of the Fathers 1 go so far as to challenge 

 the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way 

 of testing the truth of Christianity. Medieval 

 Christianity is at one with patristic, on this head. 

 The masses, the clergy, the theologians, and the 

 philosophers alike, live and move and have their 

 being in a world full of demons, in which sorcery 

 and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor 

 did the Reformation make any difference. What- 

 ever else Luther assailed, he left the traditional 

 demonology untouched ; nor could any one have 

 entertained a more hearty and uncompromising 

 belief in the devil, than he and, at a later period, 

 the Calvinistic fanatics of New England did. 

 Finally, in these last years of the nineteenth 

 century, the demonological hypotheses of the first 

 century are, explicitly or implicitly, held and 

 occasionally acted upon by the immense majority 

 of Christians of all confessions. 



1 Tortullian (Apolog. adv. Gentes, cap. xxiii.) thus challenges 

 the Roman authorities : let them bring a possessed person into 

 the presence of a Christian before their tribunal , and if the 

 demon does not confess himself to be such, on the order of the 

 Christian, let the Chiistian be executed out of hand. 



