208 HUXLEY 



and children. And when I reflect that the record of 

 a plain and simple declaration upon such an occasion 

 as this, that the belief in witchcraft and possession is 

 wicked nonsense, would have rendered the long agony 

 of medieval humanity impossible, I am prompted to 

 reject, as dishonouring, the supposition that such 

 declaration was withheld out of condescension to 

 popular error. 1 



The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apoc- 

 alypse assert the existence of the devil, of his 

 demons and of hell, as plainly as they do that of God 

 and His angels and heaven. It is plain that the Mes- 

 sianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of 

 these books are the obverse and the reverse of the 

 same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture 

 to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions 

 of the Churches, it will appear that, in this one par- 

 ticular, at any rate, time has brought about no im- 

 portant deviation from primitive belief. From Justin 

 onwards it may often be a fair question whether God, 

 or the devil, occupies a larger share of the attention 

 of the Fathers. It is the devil who instigates the 

 Roman authorities to persecute; the gods and god- 

 desses 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 

 go so far as to challenge the pagans to a sort of exor- 

 cising match, by way of testing the truth of Chris- 

 tianity. Medieval Christianity is at one with patristic, 

 on this head. The masses, the clergy, the theo- 

 logians, and the philosophers alike, live and move and 

 have their being in a world full of demons, in which 

 sorcery and possession are every-day occurrences. 



*Ib. t pp. 215, 216. 



