AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 455 



every-day occurrences. Nor did the Reformation make any dif- 

 ference. Whatever 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 demono- 

 logical hypotheses of the first century are, explicitly or implicitly, 

 held and occasionally acted upon, hy the immense majority of 

 Christians of all confessions. 



Only here and there has the progress of scientific thought, out- 

 side the ecclesiastical world, so far affected Christians that they 

 and their teachers fight shy of the demonology of their creed. 

 They are fain to conceal their real disbelief in one half of Chris- 

 tian doctrine by judicious silence about it ; or by flight to those 

 refuges for the logically destitute, accommodation or allegory. 

 But the faithful who fly to allegory in order to escape absurdity 

 resemble nothing so much as the sheep in the fable who — to save 

 their lives — jumped into the pit. The allegory pit is too commo- 

 dious, is ready to swallow up so much more than one wants to put 

 into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory ; if the early 

 recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the demons is an alle- 

 gory ; if the plain declaration of the writer of the first Epistle of 

 John (iii, 8), " To this end was the Son of God manifested that he 

 might destroy the works of the devil," is allegorical, then the Pau- 

 line verson of the fall may be allegorical, and still more the words 

 of consecration of the Eucharist, or the promise of the second com- 

 ing ; in fact, there is not a dogma of ecclesiastical Christianity 

 the scriptural basis of which may not be whittled away by a simi- 

 lar process. 



As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the 

 New Testament ask himself whether Jesus and his immediate 

 friends and disciples can be dishonored more grossly than by the 

 supposition that they said and did that which is attributed to 

 them ; while, in reality, they disbelieved in Satan and his demons, 

 in possession and in exorcism ? * 



An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no 

 right to look at the propositions of the Christian faith with one 

 eye open and the other shut. (" Tract 85/' p. 29.) It really is not 

 permissible to see with one eye, that Jesus is affirmed to declare 

 the personality and the fatherhood of God, his loving providence, 

 and his accessibility to prayer, and to shut the other to the no less 

 definite teaching ascribed to Jesus in regard to the personality 

 and the misanthropy of the devil, his malignant watchfulness, 



* See the expression of orthodox opinion upon the " accommodation " subterfuge, al- 

 ready cited, " Nineteenth Century," February, 1889, p. 173 ; " Popular Science Monthly," 

 April, 1889, p. 754. 



