The devil was not always victor. There was One whom neither his low cunning nor his bland address nor his blunt audacity could beguile—the Son of God, his predestined conqueror. The passages in the Gospels which relate the attempts made by Satan to tempt the Lord furnished congenial subjects to the illuminators of the Middle Ages, and they treated those subjects with their usual enormous crudity. In one very ancient Saxon psalter, in manuscript, preserved at the British Museum, there is a colossal Christ, with one foot upon a devil, the other foot about to fall upon a second devil, and with his hands delivering from the open mouth of a third devil human souls, who hold up to him their hands clasped as in prayer. In this picture the sympathies of the artist are evidently not on the side of the evil spirits. Their malevolence is apparent, and their attitude is ignominious. The rescued souls are, indeed, a pigmy crew, of woe-begone aspect; but their resistless Deliverer towers aloft in such imposing altitude that the tallest of the saints hardly reaches above his knees. In another picture of very early date, the Lord upon a high place is rescuing a soul from three scoffing devils, who are endeavoring to pull him down to perdition by cords twisted round his legs. This soul we are permitted to consider safe; but below, in a corner of the spacious drawing, a winged archangel is spearing a lost soul into the flames of hell, using the spear in the manner of a farmer handling a pitchfork.
The Temptation.
These ancient attempts to exhibit the endless conflict between good and evil are too rude even to be interesting. The specimen annexed, of later date, about 1475, occurs in a Poor People's Bible (Biblia Pauperum), block-printed, in which it forms part of an extensive frontispiece. The book was once the property of George III., at the sale of whose personal effects it was bought for the British Museum, where it now is. It has the additional interest of being one of the oldest specimens of wood-engraving yet discovered.
The mountain in the background, adorned by a single tree, is the height to which the Lord was taken by the tempter, and from which the devil urged him to cast himself down.
A very frequent object of caricature during the ages when terror ruled the minds of men was human life itself—its brevity, its uncertainty, and the absurd, ill-timed suddenness with which inexorable death sometimes cuts it short. Herodotus records that at the banquets of the Egyptians it was customary for a person to carry about the table the figure of a corpse lying upon a coffin, and to cry out, "Behold this image of what yourselves shall be; therefore eat, drink, and be merry." There are traces of a similar custom in the records of other ancient nations, among whom it was regarded as a self-evident truth that the shortness of life was a reason for making the most of it while it lasted. And their notion of making the most of it was to get from it the greatest amount of pleasure. This vulgar scheme of existence vanished at the promulgation of the doctrine that the condition of every soul was fixed unalterably at the moment of its severance from the body, or, at best, after a short period of purgation, and that the only way to avoid unending anguish was to do what the Church commanded and to avoid what the Church forbade. Terror from that time ruled Christendom. Terror covered the earth with ecclesiastical structures, gave the Church a tenth of all revenues and two-fifths of all property. By every possible device death was clothed with new and vivid terrors, and in every possible way the truth was brought home to the mind that the coming of death could be as unexpected as it was inevitable and unwelcome. The tolling of the church-bell spread the gloom of the death-chamber over the whole town; and the death-crier, with bell and lantern, wearing a garment made terrible by a skull and cross-bones, went his rounds, by day or night, crying to all good people to pray for the soul just departed.[6]
French Death-crier—"Pray for the Soul just departed."