3 books to know The Devil. Джон Мильтон

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СКАЧАТЬ If she had been as ugly as the Devil, she had nobody to rival her; so that she need not fear Adam should leave her, and get another mistress.

      2. If she had been as bright and as beautiful as an angel, she had no other admirer but poor Adam; and he could have no room to be jealous of her, or afraid she should cuckold him; so that, in short, Eve had no such occasion for her beauty, nor could she make any use of it to a bad purpose, or to a good; and therefore I believe the Devil, who is too cunning to do anything that signifies nothing, rather tempted her by the hope of increasing her wit, than her beauty.

      But to come back to the method of Satan’s tempting her; namely, by whispering to her in her sleep. It was a cunning trick, that is the truth of it; and by that means he certainly set her head a madding after deism, and to be made a goddess; and then backed it by the subtle talk he had with her afterwards.

      I am the more particular upon this part, because, however the Devil may have been the first that ever practised it, yet I can assure him the experiment has been tried upon many a woman since, to the wheedling her out of her modesty, as well as her simplicity; and the cunning men tell us still, that if you can come at a woman when she is in a deep sleep, and whisper to her close to her ear, she will certainly dream of the thing you say to her, and so will a man too.

      Well, be this so to her race or not, it was, it seems, so to her; for she waked with her head filled with pleasing ideas, and, as some will have it, unlawful desires; such as, to be sure, she had never entertained before. These are supposed to be fatally infused in her dream, and suggested to her waking soul, when the organ ear which conveyed them was dozed and insensible; strange fate of sleeping in paradise! that whereas we have notice but of two sleeps there, that in one a woman should go out of him, and in the other the Devil should come into her.

      Certainly, when Satan first made the attempt upon Eve, he did not think he should have so easily conquered her, or have brought his business about so soon; the Devil himself could not have imagined she should have been so soon brought to forget the command given, or at least who gave it, and have ventured to transgress against him. and made her forget, that God had told her, it should be death to her to touch it; and, above all, that she should aspire to be as wise as him, who was so ignorant before, as to believe it was for fear of her being like himself, that he had forbid it her.

      Well might she be said to be the weaker vessel, though Adam himself had little enough to say for his being the stronger of the two, when he was over-persuaded (if it were done by persuasion,) by his wife to the same thing.

      And mark how wise they were after they had eaten, and what fools they both acted like, even to one another; nay, even all the knowledge they attained to by it, was, for aught I see, only to know that they were fools, and to be sensible both of sin and shame; and see how simply they acted, I say, upon their having committed the crime, and being detected in it:

      “View them today conversing with their God,

      His image both enjoyed and understood;

      To-morrow skulking with a sordid flight,

      Among the bushes, from the Infinite,

      As if that power was blind, which gave them sight;

      With senseless labor tagging fig-leaf vests,

      To hide their bodies from the sight of beasts.

      Hark! how the fool pleads faint, for forfeit life

      First he reproaches heaven, and then his wife:

      ‘The woman which thou gavest,’ as if the gift

      Could rob him of the little reason left;

      A weak pretence to shift his early crime,

      As if accusing her would excuse him;

      But thus encroaching crime dethrones the sense,

      And intercepts the heavenly influence;

      Debauches reason, makes the man a fool,

      And turns his active light to ridicule.”

      It must be confessed, that it was an unaccountable degeneracy, even of their common reasoning, which Adam and Eve both fell into upon the first committing the offence of tasting the forbidden fruit: if that was their being made as gods, it made but a poor appearance in its first coming, to hide their nakedness when there was nobody to see them, and cover themselves among the bushes from their Maker: but thus it was, and this the Devil had brought them to; and well might he, and all the clan of hell, as Mr. Milton brings them in, laugh and triumph over the man after the blow was given, as having so egregiously abused and deluded them both.

      But here, to be sure, began the Devil’s new kingdom; as he had now seduced the two first creatures, he was pretty sure of success upon all the race; and therefore prepared to attack them also, as soon as they came on; nor was their increasing multitude any dis couragement to his attempt, but just the contrary; for he had agents enough to employ, if every man and woman that should be born was to want a devil to wait upon them, separately and singly to seduce them; whereas some whole nations have been such willing subjects to him, that one of his seraphic imps may, for aught we know, have been enough to guide a whole country; the people being entirely subjected to his government for many ages; as in America, for example, where some will have it, that he conveyed the first inhabitants; at least, if he did not, we do not well know who did, or how they got thither.

      And how came all the communication to be so entirely cut off between the nations of Europe and Africa, from whence America must certainly have been peopled, or else the Devil must have done it indeed? I say, how came the communication to be entirely cut off between them, that except the time, whenever it was, that people did at first reach from one to the other, none ever came back to give their friends any account of their success, or invite them to follow? Nor did they hear of one another afterwards, as we have reason to think. Did Satan politically keep them thus asunder, lest news from heaven should reach them, and so they should be recovered out of his government? We cannot tell how to give any other rational account of it, that a nation, nay, a quarter of the world, or, as some will have it to be, half the globe, should be peopled from Europe or Africa, or both, and nobody ever go after them, or come back from them, in above three thousand years after.

      Nay, that those countries should be peopled when there was no navigation in use in these parts of the world, no ships made that could carry provisions enough to support the people that sailed in them, but that they must have been starved to death before they could reach the shore of America; the ferry from Europe or Africa in any part, (which we have known navigation to be practised in,) being at least a thousand miles, and in most places much more.

      But as to the Americans, let the Devil and them alone to account for their coming thither; this we are certain of, that we knew nothing of them for a many hundred years; and when we did, when the discovery was made, they that went from hence found Satan in a full and quiet possession of them, ruling them with an arbitrary government, particular to himself: he had led them into a blind subjection to himself, nay, I might call it devotion, (for it was all of religion that was to be found among them;) worshipping horrible idols in his name, to whom he directed human sacrifices continually to be made, till he deluged the country with blood, arid ripened them up for the destruction that followed, from the invasion of the Spaniards, who he knew would hurry them all out of the world as fast as he (the Devil) himself could desire of them.

      But to go back a little to the original of things. It is evident that Satan has made a much better market of mankind, СКАЧАТЬ