3 books to know The Devil. Джон Мильтон

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СКАЧАТЬ person in a deep sleep, so as to speak dis tinctly to the person, and yet not awaken him, as has been frequently tried, the person sleeping shall dream distinctly of what you say to him; nay, shall drearn the very words you say.

      We have then no more to ask, but how the Devil can convey himself to the ear of a sleeping person; and it is granted then, that he may have power to make us dream what he pleases. But this is not all; for if he can so forcibly, by his invisible application, cause us to dream what he pleases, why can he not, with the same facility, prompt our thoughts, whether sleeping or waking’? To dream, is nothing else but to think sleeping; and we have abundance of deep-headed gentlemen among us, who give us ample testimony, that they dream waking.

      But if the Devil can prompt us to dream, that is to say, to think; yet, if he does not know our thoughts, how then can he tell whether the whisper had its effect? The answer is plain; the Devil, like the angler, baits the hook; if the fish bite, he lies ready to take the advantage; he whispeas to the imagination, and then waits to see how it works; as Naomi said to Ruth, chap. hi. ver. 18. “Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall; for the man will not be at rest until he have finished the thing.” Thus, when the Devil had whispered to Eve in her sleep, according to Milton, and suggested mischief to her imagination, he only sat still to see how the matter would work; for he knew, if it took with her, he should hear more of it; and then, by finding her alone the next day, without her ordinary guard, her husband, he presently concluded she had swallowed the bait; and so attacked her afresh.

      A small deal of craft, and less, by far, than we have reason to believe the Devil is master of, will serve to discover, whether such and such thoughts as he knows he has suggested, have taken place or no; the action of the person presently discovers it, at least to him that lies always upon the watch, and has every word; every gesture, every step, we take subsequent to his operation, open to him. It may therefore, for aught we know, be a great mistake, and what most of us are guilty of, to tell our dreams to one another in the morning, after we have been disturbed with them in the night; for if the Devil converses with us so insensibly, as some are of opinion he does, that is to say, if he can hear as far as we can see, we may be telling our story to him indeed, when we think we are only talking to one another.

      This brings me most naturally to the important in quiry, whether the Devil can walk about the world invisibly or no? The truth is, this is no question to me; for as I have taken away his visibility already, and have denied him all prescience of futurity too, and have proved he cannot know our thoughts, nor put any force upon persons or actions, if we should take away his invisibility too, we should undevil him quite, to all intents and purposes, as to any mischief he could do; nay, it would banish him the world, and he might even go and seek his fortune somewhere else; for if he could neither be visible or invisible, neither act in public or in private; he could neither have business or being in this sphere, nor could we be any way concerned with him.

      The Devil therefore most certainly has a power and liberty of moving about in this world, after some manner or another; this is verified as well by way of allegory, as by way of history, in the scripture itself; and as the first strongly suggests and supposes it to be so, the last positively asserts it; and not to crowd this work with quotations from a book which we have not much to do with in the Devil’s story, at least not much to his satisfaction, I only hint his personal appearance to our Saviour in the wilderness, where it is said, “ the Devil taketh him up to an exceeding high mountain; “ and in another place, “the Devil departed from him.” What shape or figure he appeared in, we do not find mentioned; but I cannot doubt his appearing to him there, any more than I can his talking to our Saviour in the mouths, and with the voices, of the several persons who were under the terrible affliction of an actual possession.

      These things leave us no room to doubt of what is advanced above; namely, that he (the Devil) has a certain residence, or liberty of residing in, and moving about upon, the surface of this earth, as well as in the compass of the atmosphere, vulgarly called the air, in some manner or other: that is the general.

      It remains to inquire into the manner; which I resolve into two kinds:

      1. Ordinary, which I suppose to be his invisible motions as a spirit; under which consideration I suppose him to have an unconfined, unlimited, unrestrained liberty, as to the manner of acting; and this either in persons, by possession; or in things; by agitation.

      2. Extraordinary; which I understand to be his appearances in borrowed shapes and bodies, or shadows rather of bodies; assuming speech, figure, posture, and several powers, of which we can give little or no account; in which extraordinary maner of appearances, he is either limited by a superior power, or limits himself politically, as being not the way most for his interest or purpose, to act in his business, which is more effectually done in his state of obscurity.

      Hence we must suppose the Devil has it very much in his own choice, whether to act in one capacity, or in the other, or in both; that is to say, of appearing, and not appearing, as he finds for his purpose. In this state of invisibility, and under the operation of these powers and liberties, he performs all his functions and offices, as devil, as prince of darkness, as god of this world, as tempter, accuser, deceiver, and all whatsoever other names of office, or titles of honor, he is known by.

      Now taking him in this large unlimited, or little limited state of action, he is well called, the god of this world; for he has very much of the attribute of omnipresence, and may be said, either by himself, or his agents, to be everywhere, and see everything; that is to say, everything that is visible; for I cannot allow him any share of omniscience at all.

      That he rages about everywhere, is with us. and sometimes in us, sees when he is not seen, hears when he is not heard, comes in without leave, and goes out without noise; is neither to be shut in, or shut out; that when he runs from us, we cannot catch him; arid when he runs after us, we cannot escape him; is seen when he is not known, and is known when he is not seen; all these things, and more, we have knowledge enough about, to convince us of the truth of them; so that, as I have said above, he is certainly walking to and fro through the earth, &c. after some manner or other, and in some figure or other, visible or in visible, as he finds occasion. Now, in order to make our history of him complete, the next question before us is, how, and in what manner, he acts with mankind? How his kingdom is carried on; and by what methods he does his business, for he certainly has a great deal of business to do; he is not an idle spectator, nor is he walking about incognito, and clothed in mist and darkness, purely in kindness to us, that we should not be frighted at him; but it is in policy, that he may act undiscovered, that he may see and not be seen, may play his game in the dark, and not be de tected in his roguery; that he may prompt mischief, raise tempests, blow up coals, kindle strife, embroil nations, use instruments, and not be known to have his hand in anything; when at the same time he really has an hand in everything.

      Some are of opinion, and I among the rest, that if the Devil was personally and visibly present among us, and we conversed with him face to face, we should be so familiar with him in a little time, that his ugly figure would not affect us at all; that his terrors would not fright us; or that we should any more trouble ourselves about him, than we did with the great comet in 1678, which appeared so long, and so constantly, without any particular known event, that at last we took no more notice of it, than of the other ordinary stars which had appeared before we or our ancestors were born.

      Nor indeed should we have much reason to be frighted at him, or at least none of those silly things could be said of him, which we now amuse ourselves about, and by which we set him up, like a scare-crow, to fright children and old women, to fill up old stories, make songs and ballads; and, in a word, carry on the low-prized buffoonry of the common people; we should either see him in his angelic form, as he was from the original; or, if he has any deformities entailed upon him by the supreme sentence, and injustice to the deformity of his crime, they would be of a superior nature, and fitted more for our contempt as well as horror, than those weak-fancied trifles contrived by our ancient devil-raisers СКАЧАТЬ