454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



then, the demons are the founders and maintainers of idolatry ; 

 as the " powers of the air," they afflict mankind with pestilence 

 and famine ; as " unclean spirits/' they cause disease of mind and 

 body. 



The significance of the appearance of Jesus, as the Messiah or 

 Christ, is the reversal of the satanic work, by putting an end to 

 both sin and death. He announces that the kingdom of God is at 

 hand, when the " prince of this world " shall be finally "cast out" 

 (John xii, 31) from the cosmos, as Jesus, during his earthly career, 

 cast him out from individuals. Then will Satan and all his dev- 

 iltry, along with the wicked whom they have seduced to their 

 destruction, be hurled into the abyss of unquenchable fire — there 

 to endure continual torture, without a hope of winning pardon 

 from the merciful God, their Father ; or of moving the glorified 

 Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession ; or even of inter- 

 rupting, by a momentary sympathy with their wretchedness, the 

 harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men, eternally 

 lapped in bliss unspeakable. 



The straitest Protestant, who refuses to admit the existence of 

 any source of divine truth, except the Bible, will not deny that 

 every point of the pneumatological theory here set forth has am- 

 ple scriptural warranty : the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and 

 the Apocalypse assert the existence of the devil and his demons 

 and hell, as plainly as they do that of God and his angels and 

 heaven. It is plain that the Messianic and the satanic concep- 

 tions 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 particular, at any rate, time has 

 brought about no important deviation from primitive belief. 

 From Justin onward, 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 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 a heresy arises, the 

 devil has suggested it ; and some of the fathers * go so far as to 

 challenge the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of test- 

 ing the truth of Christianity. Mediaeval Christianity is at one 

 with patristic, on this head. The masses, the clergy, the theolo- 

 gians, and the philosophers alike, live and move and have their be- 

 ing in a world full of demons, in which sorcery and possession are 



* Tertullian (" 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 Christian be executed out of hand. 



