3 books to know The Devil. Джон Мильтон

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СКАЧАТЬ sermon to his disciples, where his text was, Money is the Devil.

      Nor, upon the whole, is any wrong done to the Devil by this kind of treatment; it only gives him the sovereignty of the whole army of hell; and, making all the numberless legions of the bottomless pit servants, or, as the scripture calls them, angels, to Satan, the grand devil, all their actions, performances and achievements, are justly attributed to him, not as the prince of devils only, but the emperor of devils; the prince of all the princes of devils.

      Under this denomination, then, of Devil, all the powers of hell, all the princes of the air, all the black armies of Satan, are comprehended; and in such manner they are to be understood in this whole work, mutatis mutandis, according to the several circumstances of which we are to speak of them.

      This being premised, and my authority being so good, Satan must not take it ill, if I treat him after the manner of men, and give him those titles which he is best known by among us; for indeed, having so many, it is not very easy to call him out of his name.

      However, as I am obliged by the duty of an historian to decency as well as impartiality, so I thought it necessary, before I used too much freedom with Satan, to produce authentic documents, and bring antiquity upon the stage, to justify the manner of my writing, and let you see I shall describe him in no colors, nor call him by any name, but what he has been known by for many ages before me.

      And now, though, writing to the common understanding of my readers, I am obliged to treat Satan very coarsely, and to speak of him in the common acceptation, calling him plain Devil, a word which in this mannerly age is not so sonorous as others might be, and which by the error of the times is apt to prejudice us against his person; yet it must be acknowledged he has a great many other names and surnames which he might be known by, of a less obnoxious im port than that of Devil or Destroyer, &c.

      Mr. Milton, indeed, wanting titles of honor to give to the leaders of Satan’s host, is obliged to borrow several of his scripture names, and bestow them upon his infernal heroes, whom he makes the generals and leaders of the armies of hell; and so he makes Beelzebub, Lucifer, Belial, Mammon, and some others, to be the names of particular devils, members of Satan’s upper house, or Pandemonium; whereas indeed, these are all names proper and peculiar to Satan himself.

      The scripture also has some names of a coarser kind, by which the Devil is understood, as particularly, which is noted already, in the Apocalypse he is called the Great Red Dragon, the Beast, the Old Serpent, and the like. But take it in the scripture, or where you will in history sacred or profane, you will find that in general the Devil is, as I have said above, his ordinary name in all languages, and in all nations; the name by which he and his works are principally distinguished: also the, scripture, besides that it often gives him this name, speaks of the works of the Devil, of the subtilty of the Devil, of casting out Devils, of being tempted of the Devil, of being possessed with a Devil; and so many other expressions of that kind, as I have said already, are made use of for us to understand the evil spirit by, that, in a word, Devil is the common name of all wicked spirits: for Satan is no more the Devil, as if he alone was so, and all the rest were a diminutive species who did not go by that name; but, I say, even in scripture, every spirit, whether under his dominion, or out of his dominion, is called the Devil, and is as much a real devil, that is to say, a condemned spirit, and employed in the same wicked work, as Satan himself.

      His name then being thus ascertained, and his existence acknowledged, it should be a little inquired, what he is. We believe there is such a thing, such a creature, as the Devil; and that he has been, and may still with propriety of speech, and without injustice to his character, be called by his ancient name, Devil.

      But who is he? What is his original? Whence came he? And what is his present station and condition? For these things, and these inquiries, are very necessary to his history; nor indeed can any part of his history be complete without them.

      That he is of an ancient and noble original must be acknowledged; for he is heaven-born and of angelic race, as has been touched already: if scripture evidence may be of any weight in the question, there is no room to doubt the genealogy of the Devil; he is not only spoken of as an angel, but as a fallen angel, one that had been in heaven, had beheld the face of God in his full effulgence of glory, and had surrounded the throne of the Most High; from whence, commencing rebel, and being expelled, he was cast down, down, down, God and the Devil himself only know where; for indeed we cannot say that any man on earth knows it; and wherever it is, he has ever since man’s creation been a plague to him, been a tempter, adelnder, a calumniator, an enemy, and the object of man’s horror and aversion.

      As his original is heaven-born, and his race angelic; so the angelic nature is evidently placed in a class superior to the human; and this the scripture is express in also, when, speaking of man, it says, he made him a little lower than the angels.

      Thus the Devil, as mean thoughts as you may have of him, is of a better family than any of you, nay, than the best gentleman of you all; what he may be fallen to, is one thing, but what he is fallen from, is another.

      Nor is the scripture more an help to us in the search after the Devil’s original, than it is in our search after his nature. It is true, authors are not agreed about his age, what time he was created, how many years he enjoyed his state of blessedness before he fell; or how many years he continued with his whole army in a state of darkness, and before the creation of man. It is supposed it might be a considerable space; and that it was a part of his punishment too, being all the while unactive, unemployed, having no business, nothing to do but gnawing his own bowels, and rolling in the agony of his own self-reproaches, being an hell to himself in reflecting on the glorious state from whence he was fallen.

      How long he remained thus, it is true, we have no light into from history, and but little from tradition: Rabbi Judah says, the Jews were of the opinion, that he remained twenty thousand years in that condition; and that the world shall continue twenty thousand more, in which he shall find work enough to satisfy his mischievous desires; but he shows no authority for his opinion.

      Indeed, let the Devil have been as idle as they think he was before, it must be acknowledged, that now he is the most busy, vigilant and diligent of all God’s creatures, and very full of employment too, such as it is.

      Scripture, indeed, gives us light into the enmity there is between the two natures, the diabolical and the human; the reason of it, and how arid by what means the power of the Devil is restrained by the

      Messias; and to those who are willing to trust to gospel light, and believe what the scripture says of the DevilJ” there may much of his history be discovered, and therefore those that list may go there for a fuller account of the matter.

      But to reserve all scripture evidence of these things, as a magazine in store for the use of those with whom scripture testimony is of force, I must, for the present, turn to other inquiries, being now directing my story to an age, wherein to be driven to revelation and scripture assertions is esteemed giving up the dispute; people now-a-days must have demonstration; and, in a word, nothing will satisfy the age, but such evidence as perhaps the nature of the question will not admit.

      It is hard, indeed, to bring demonstrations in such a case as this: No man has seen God at any time, says the scripture, (1 John iv. 12.) So the Devil, being a spirit incorporeal, an angel of light, and consequently not visible in his own substance, nature and form, it may in some sense be said, no man hath seen the Devil at any time; all those pretences of phrensiful and fanciful people, who tell us, they have seen the Devil, I shall examine, and perhaps expose by themselves.

      It might take up a great deal of our time here, to inquire whether the Devil has any particular shape, or personality of substance, which can be visible to us. felt, heard, or understood, and which he cannot alter; arid then, what shapes or appearances СКАЧАТЬ