3 books to know The Devil. Джон Мильтон

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СКАЧАТЬ that ex quisite quality called a devilish spirit; in which it would naturally occur, to give you a whole chapter upon the glorious articles of malice and envy, and especially upon that luscious, delightful triumphant passion called revenge; how natural to man, nay even to both sexes; how pleasant in the very contemplation, though there be not just at that time a power of ex ecution; how palatable it is in itself; and how well it relishes when dished up with proper sauces; such as plots, contrivance, scheme, and confederacy, all leading on to execution. How it possesses a human soul in all the most sensible parts; how it empowers mankind to sin in imagination, as effectually to all future intents and purposes, (death,) as if he had sinned actually. How safe a practice it is too, as to punishment in this life; namely, that it empowers us to cut throats clear of the gallows, to slander virtue, reproach innocence, wound honor, and stab reputation; and, in a word, to do all the wicked things in the world, out of the reach of the law.

      It would also require some few words to describe the secret operations of those nice qualities, when they reach the human soul; how effectually they form an hell within us, and how imperceptibly they assimilate and transform us into devils, mere human devils, as really devils as Satan himself, or any of his angels; and that therefore it is not so much out of the way, as some imagine, to say, such a man is an incarnate devil; for as crime made Satan a devil, who was before a bright immortal seraph, or angel of light, how much more easily may the same crime make the same devil, though every way meaner, and more contemptible, of a man or a woman either? But this is too grave a subject for me at this time.

      The Devil being thus, I say, fired with rage and envy, in consequence of his jealousy upon the creation of man, his torment is increased to the highest by the limitation of his power, and being forbid to act against mankind by force of arms; this is, I say, part of his hell, which, as above, is within him, and which he carries with him wherever he goes; nor is it so difficult to conceive of hell, or of the Devil either, under this just description, as it is by all the usual notions that we are taught to entertain of them, by (the old women) our instructors; for every man may, by taking but a common view of himself, and making a just scrutiny into his own passions, on some of their particular excursions, see an hell within himself, and himself a mere devil as long as the inflammation lasts; and that as really, and to all intents and purposes, as if he had the angel (Satan) before his face, in his locality and personality; that is to say, all devil and monster in his person; and an immaterial, but in tense fire flaming about and from within him, at all the pores of bis body.

      The notions we receive of the Devil, as a person being in hell as a place, are infinitely absurd and ridiculous. The first we are certain is not true in fact, because he has a certain liberty, (however limited, that is not to the purpose,) is daily visible, and to be traced in his several attacks upon mankind, and has been so ever since his first appearance in Paradise; as to his corporal visibility, that is riot the present question neither; it is enough that we can hunt him by the foot, that we can follow him as hounds do a fox upon an hot scent. We can see him as plainly by the effect, by the mischief he does, and more by the mischief he puts us upon doing, I say, as plainly, as if we saw him by the eye.

      It is not to be doubted but the Devil can see us when and where we cannot see him. And as he has a personality, though it be spirituous, he and his angels too may be reasonably supposed to inhabit the world of spirits, and to have free access from thence to the regions of life, arid to pass and repass in the air, as really, though not perceptible to us, as the spirits of men do, after their release from the body, pass to a place (wherever that is) which is appointed for them.

      If the Devil was confined to a place (hell) as a prison, he could then have no business here; and if we pretend to describe hell, as not a prison, but that the devil has liberty to be there, or not to be there, as he pleased, then he would certainly never be there, or hell is not such a place as we are taught to understand it to be.

      Indeed, according to some, hell should be a place of fire and torment to the souls that are cast into it, but not to the devils themselves; whom we make little more or less than keepers and turnkeys to hell, as a gaol; that they are sent about to bring souls thither, lock them in when they come, and then away upon the scent to fetch more. That one sort of devils are made to live in the world among men, and to be busy continually debauching and deluding mankind, bringing them as it were to the gates of hell; and then, another sort are porters and carriers to fetch them in.

      This is, in short, little more or less than the old story of Pluto, of Cerberus, and of Charon; only that our tale is not half so well told, nor the parts of the fable so well laid together.

      In all these notions of hell and the Devil, the torments of the first, and the agency of the last tormenting, we meet with not one word of the main, and perhaps only accent of horror, which belongs to us to judge of about hell, I mean the absence of heaven; expulsion and exclusion from the presence and face of the chief Ultimate, the only eternal and sufficient Good; and this loss sustained by a sordid neglect of our concern in that excellent part, in exchange for the most contemptible and justly condemned trifles, and all this eternal and irrecoverable. These people tell us nothing of the eternal reproaches of conscience, the horror of desperation, and the anguish of a mind hopeless of ever seeing the glory, which alone constitutes heaven, and which makes all other places dreadful, and even darkness itself.

      And this brings me directly to the point in hand; namely, the state of that hell we ought to have in view, when we speak of the devil as in hell. This is the very hell, which is the torment of the devil; in short, the Devil is in hell, and hell is in the Devil; he is filled with this unquenchable fire, he is expelled the place of glory, banished from the regions of light; absence from the life of all beatitude is his curse; despair is the reigning passion in his mind; and all the little constituent parts of his torment, such as rage, envy, malice, and jealousy, are consolidated in this, to make his misery complete; namely, the duration of it all, the eternity of his condition; that he is without hope, without redemption, without recovery.

      If anything can inflame this hell, and make it hotter, it is this only, and this does add an inexpressible horror to the Devil himself; namely, the seeing man (the only creature he hates) placed in a state of recovery, a glorious establishment of redemption formed for him in heaven, and the scheme of it perfected on earth; by which this man, though even the Devil by his art may have deluded him, and drawn him into crime, is yet in a state of recovery, which the Devil is not; and that it is not in his (Satan’s) power to prevent it. Now take the Devil as he is in his own nature angelic,. a bright immortal seraph, heaven-born, and having tasted the eternal beatitude, which these are appointed to enjoy; the loss of that state to himself, the possession of it granted to his rival, though wicked like and as himself; I say, take the Devil as he is, having a quick sense of his own perdition, and a stinging sight of his rival’s felicity, it is hell enough, and more than enough, even for an angel to support; nothing we can conceive, can be worse.

      As to any other fire than this, such, and so immaterially intense, as to torment a spirit, which is itself fire also; I will not say it cannot be, because to Infinite everything is possible; but I must say, I cannot conceive rightly of it.

      I will not enter here into the wisdom or reasonableness of representing the torments of hell to be fire, and that fire to be a commixture of flame and sulphur; it has pleased God to let the horror of those eternal agonies about a lost heaven be laid before us by those similitudes or allegories, which are most moving to our senses, and to our understandings; nor will I dispute the possibility; much less will I doubt but that there is to be a consummation of misery to all the objects of misery, when, the Devil’s kingdom in this world ending with the world itself, that liberty he has now may be farther abridged; when he may be returned to the same state he was in between the time of his fall and the creation of the world; with perhaps some additional vengeance on him, such as at present we cannot de scribe, for all that treason, and those high crimes and misdemeanors, which he has been guilty of here, in his conversation with mankind.

      As his infelicity will be then consummated and completed, so the felicity of СКАЧАТЬ