From this scheme then, not less than from the former, we fail to obtain satisfaction. It does not reconcile the faith of the conscience with the faith of the understanding; but simply prefers the latter, to the injury of the former, compromising God’s abhorrence of evil; and, for the sake of maintaining his sovereignty, making it his instrument. In fine, philosophy must make confession of its ignorance, and talk no more so exceeding proudly. This question of ages is too much for all its subtlety. Let us pass on to the doctrinal search of Scripture. Does it either reveal any new view of our subject, or determine our choice to either of the schemes we have reviewed?
II. Trinitarian theologians maintain, that the Bible reveals to us the existence of a created spirit of evil, with a host of subordinate associates in guilt; who seduced our first parents, and so introduced both the spiritual depravity and the mortality of our race; who has since tormented the bodies of men with divers diseases, afflicted their minds with some species of insanity, and corrupted their conscience with every variety of horrible and guilty thought; and who especially assailed the person, and withstood the kingdom of Christ, knowing that the Messiah’s power would finally overthrow his own. In opposition to this statement, I submit, that in neither the Mosaic nor the Christian dispensation have we any revelation of the existence of such a being, or any doctrinal solution of the problem respecting the origin of evil. Let me not, however, be supposed to say, that no such beings as Satan, the fallen Angels, and demons, are named in Scripture. I do not pretend to fritter all these away into personifications and figures of speech. I have no doubt that some of the sacred authors believed in the real existence and agency of such beings; I have just as little doubt that others did not; and that the Hebrew conceptions on this subject underwent a regular development in the course of their history, no part of them having any origin in supernatural revelation, but the whole being either the result of natural speculation or a gift from foreign tribes. This will be thought very shocking by those who, maintaining the plenary inspiration of the Bible, cannot imagine that it contains any traces of the notions and sentiments of its various times; and cannot think of admitting even an incidental allusion that is not an infallible oracle. But until it can be shown, that a person inspired is unable to form an opinion of his own; that he has no ideas from education and position, no prepossessions in common with his age; that, from Moses to the John of Patmos, every scriptural author is an unerring authority, not merely in faith and morals, but in cosmogony and physics, in geology and astronomy, in natural history, physiology, metaphysics and medicine; we may venture to maintain, on the ground of historical evidence, that the belief in witchcraft and charms, in angels and devils with Chaldee names, in demoniacal possession and Satanic inflictions, may be no result of revelation, but one of the natural traces of time and locality with which the Scriptures abound. There prevails, however, great misapprehension respecting the ideas of the Scripture writers on these subjects; and especially, the conception of a Devil is thought to pervade the whole Bible in one unvarying form. With a view to rectify this mistake, I will briefly notice the chief passages of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures relating to this topic; adverting, in succession, to the history of the fall; to the growth of the belief both in Satan and exorcism; and to the temptation of Christ.
(1.) It is impossible to conceive of a greater outrage upon an author’s meaning, than is the common representation of the Fall, on the account of that event in the Book of Genesis. Not a trace, even of the faintest kind, does the original narrative contain of all that theologians tell us respecting the tempter, the curse, the recovery. The tempter was not an evil spirit, but a serpent, to whose natural and instinctive cunning, and not to any diabolical instigation, the seducing thought is attributed: for “The serpent,” it is said, “was more subtle than all the beasts of the field.”[[543]] The writer, indeed, had not apparently any idea of such a being as Satan; for, throughout his five books, there is not a word in allusion to such a personage; though he records, I believe, more temptations, more trials of faith and duty, which it is thought the office of the evil one to administer, than all the rest of the Scriptures together. It is nothing to the purpose to say that, without preternatural possession, it is absurd to suppose that the serpent could speak, and become an agent in the transaction at all; for, on any view of the passage, the author ascribes to the creature the power both of speech and of walking: and to imagine that the Devil would betray himself by assuming so improbable a vehicle, and making a dumb reptile talk, is surely little consonant with the character of so subtle a diplomatist. The record affirms that, by way of punishment, the serpent was reduced to the reptile state, and compelled to crawl instead of walk;[[544]] and an author, whose imagination had reconciled itself to this conception, would feel no additional improbability in supposing the same occasion to have condemned the animal to silence. This has always been the interpretation of those Hebrew writers, who have received the account as literal history. Josephus, a man of learning and a priest, states, that “all animals at that period partook of the gift of speech with man;” that “the serpent lived on familiar terms with Adam and his wife;” and “from a malicious intention of his own, persuaded the woman to taste of the tree of knowledge;” that, in consequence, “God deprived the creature of speech and of the use of his feet.”[[545]] If the account be considered as historical, this is its plain meaning; and the insertion in it of a powerful malignant spirit, is a mere fiction of later times.[[546]]
Nor is the usual description of the results of the Fall, a less extravagant perversion of Scripture. The necessities of toil to the man, the pangs of travail to the woman, and to both a consequent abbreviation of the term of life, are all the effects of which the original speaks, and to which Josephus refers.[[547]] St. Paul adds to these the introduction of mortality; but neither in his writings, nor in any more authoritative place than the invention of modern divines, do we find the least hint of any moral corruption entailed by the fall on the human constitution, or any penal woes prepared for our lapsed nature after death. Throughout the whole subsequent Scriptures, there are only three places in which the effects of the first transgression are mentioned:[[548]] all of these are in the epistles of Paul; two, out of the three, are mere passing allusions, not occupying a line; and in the remaining one, as well as in the others, natural death alone is said to have passed on the descendants of Adam; “not” (as Mr. Locke justly remarks) “either actual or imputed sin,” which, he says, “is evidently contrary to St. Paul’s design here.”[[549]] Between the guilt of men, and the fall of their progenitor, there did not exist the slightest connexion in the Apostle’s mind; they are never once mentioned together. When he draws his fearful pictures of the depravity of both Jews and Gentiles, he is wholly silent respecting the fall, describing all this corruption not as constitutional but as actual, not as the growth of a foul and incapable nature, but rather as the abuse and insult of one inherently noble.[[550]] And when again he speaks of the fall and its issues, he is silent about moral depravity, and dwells only on physical death. Never was there a writer more barbarously tortured, more ingeniously forced to speak in a spirit which he loved to withstand, than this glorious Apostle. Out of his own writings, by incredible perversion, his generous conceptions are condemned as heresies, and his favourite sentiments denounced as blasphemies.
“I will put enmity,” says the book of Genesis, “between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”[[551]] Considered as a description of the mutual hostility and injuries of the race of venomous reptiles and the human species,—man naturally attacking the head of the creature, and the animal, especially among the naked feet of oriental climes, finding nothing in man so vulnerable as the heel,—a more vivid sentence can scarcely be conceived. Considered as a prophecy of Christ, ingenuity could construct nothing more obscure. And, accordingly, it is never once appealed to, as a prediction, either by the Messiah himself, or by any of the New Testament writers; and before the Advent, it had certainly failed to produce the proper effect of prophecy, and had not aided in preparing the minds of the Hebrews for the event. It is indeed acknowledged by “a strenuous advocate for this application of the passage,” “that the expressions here used do not necessarily imply the sense thus attributed to them; and that there is no appearance of our first parents’ having understood them in this sense, or that God intended they should so understand them.”[[552]] If, then, this prophetic signification escaped the persons to whom the announcement was made, and the nation before whose eye it lay for ages, and the Christ himself of whom it spake, and the Evangelists and Apostles who proclaimed him to the world, our doubt of its reality can scarcely be deemed unwarrantable.
But it is, I believe, a misconception of the author, to treat this passage as a piece of history. Neither Moses, nor any other scriptural writer, professes to have been miraculously instructed in the events of the antediluvian world; and if they make no such pretension themselves, it is altogether gratuitous in us to make it for them. The slightest consideration must convince us, that all natural sources of information respecting so primitive a period must have ceased to exist, at least in any reliable form: and the earliest portions of the book of Genesis have every characteristic of that beautiful mythical composition, which is the first fruit of the literary activity of every simple-hearted nation, and which mingles together in one texture, tradition, fact, speculation, poetical conception, and moral truth. In this instance, the writer seems to have been oppressed by the feeling, that human peace and tranquillity were disturbed by the restless aspirings and inquisitive ambition of the mind. If man could but be content to take the good which God has spread within his easy reach, and not permit himself to pry into the possibilities of having more, his life might be spent as in a garden of the Lord, in the warmth of sunny days, and the light sleep of unhaunted nights. But he cannot repress his insatiable curiosity, his passion for the fruits of knowledge and dignity, of which Providence has given him the idea, but which have been set beyond his permitted reach; and this thirst of his nature he resolves at all hazards to indulge; this godlike aspiration, imprisoned in a frame to which it is unsuited, chafes against his quiet, and abbreviates his days. Hence proceed the struggle and the toil of life; the thistle and the thorn which he gathers from a soil that might have yielded only flowers; hence, children are we all of care and sorrow; hence, by the sweat of the hardy brow we must live, and soon fret down existence into dust; not however, without our victory after all; for we subjugate the earth, and reign thereon.
Observe too, that Adam rules the woman; and the woman has a heel upon the serpent:—the last seduced is placed the highest; and the first corrupter sinks into a reptile. Our temptations are beneath us; and having once detected them, we are to rule them ever after. Once let the knowledge of good and evil be tasted, and the primitive equality of things, which put man and beast upon a level, is destroyed; all beings fall into the ranks of a moral gradation; and though none that have free will may escape a fall, he that is last to yield shall be the first to reign.
(2.) Neither then in the original account, nor in the scanty subsequent notices of the transgression in Eden, is there any disclosure of a Satanic existence. Let us rapidly follow down the course of Hebrew literature, and search in it for the first and successive indications of this belief. I have stated that the books of Moses are destitute of all trace of such a conception; nor can any thing at all corresponding to the popular idea of the Devil, be found in any part of the Old Testament. The name itself never once occurs; and it would be a great mistake to identify the Satan of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the Devil of the Greek.[[553]] The Satan of the former has a very uncertain personality. The name rather denotes an office, which any agent of Providence might be appointed to fill, than a definite individual being. Any person, performing the function of an accuser, or who prepares matter for accusation, by seducing men into evil,—any one acting the part of an adversary to another,—is called Satan. Thus David is called Satan to the Philistines;[[554]] a certain captain named Rezon was Satan to Israel;[[555]] the angel of Jehovah was Satan to Balaam;[[556]] nay, even Paul uses this singular expression, “Hymeneus and Alexander, I have delivered to Satan” (for what purpose, do you suppose), “that they may be taught not to blaspheme.”[[557]] No doubt this idea, at first vague and indefinite, gradually became individualized; and that which had been an appellative, passed into a proper name, yet without ever wholly losing its generic character.[[558]] At the commencement of the book of Job occurs its most distinct and definite use. It is there applied, not to a fallen Spirit, not to a repudiated subject of the celestial state, but to an angel near the throne, to a recognized minister of the Supreme Power, who appears in the courts above among “the Sons of God.” He is represented as a general inspector and public prosecutor of the Divine government over man; going to and fro over the earth, by heavenly commission, to execute the probationary part of the great Ruler’s will, and administer to mankind the severities which test their faith. In the earlier Hebrew writings, this office is said to be filled by no subordinate instrument: it is Jehovah himself who is represented as trying his servants,—as the personal cause of their afflictions, and author of their temptations. I recently heard the following passage from the first book of Chronicles adduced in proof of the agency of Satan in seducing men from their allegiance to God. “And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.”[[559]] Now it so happens, that this same event is recorded also in the much more ancient books of Samuel, where it is thus introduced: “And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and HE moved David against them to say, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’”[[560]] What can more clearly mark the natural progress of opinion on this point? As the ideas of God became more elevated and refined, it was felt to be scarcely compatible with his perfections to seduce his children into violation of the duties he himself required: and the imagination at least, if not the understanding, was relieved by assigning that office, of hardening the heart and tempting the will, (which originally had been left with Jehovah himself,) to some interposing being, who might separate between God and guilt.
When we open the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, we perceive a complete change in this class of ideas. Even the latest written of the canonical books introduce us to several angelic beings, unknown to the earlier Scriptures,—as the Michael and Gabriel of Daniel. But in addition to these, we find in the Jewish Apocrypha, for the first time, the matured conception of the Prince of evil;[[561]] who is thenceforth represented in the scarcely consistent relations of creature and enemy of the Most High: and it is in this form that the notion presents itself to us in the New Testament writings. Now what is the inference from these facts? In the books of the ancient dispensation, this malignant Spirit does not yet appear: in the writings of the new dispensation, he is mentioned,—not as a novelty of revelation, but as long familiar to the mind of every reader. The origin then of the belief in his existence, must be sought between the close of the Hebrew inspiration and the opening of the Christian. And what had happened in this interval? The Jewish people had been in long and intimate relation with Persia: connected with it by political ties, and united by the sympathies of monotheism. The characteristic features of the Persian religion were,—its doctrine of a Spirit of Evil in perpetual enmity to the Supremely Good;—and its representation of a heavenly hierarchy, whose spirits were ranged in ranks of angels and archangels, and received their separate names. These ideas then naturally passed into the Jewish mind, with little change; except that the Evil Spirit was reduced to a somewhat lower station, in obedience to the stern Mosaic principle, of the absolute Monarchy of God.[[562]] And as these notions became perfectly engrafted on the national faith of Israel, the founders of Christianity were educated in them; and they were permitted to appear by incidental allusion, and in conformity with the general sentiments of the country and the age, in the pages of history and correspondence, which the evangelists and apostles have left. Nor can I perceive, either how it can be proved, or why it should be desired, that God would annihilate from the understanding of his inspired servants, all the harmless ideas, foreign to their mission, which constituted the common stock of thought at the time, and gave them points of necessary sympathy and intellectual contact with the spirit of their generation. How slight the sanction which they give to some, at least, of these mythological imaginations, may be estimated by a single fact. The whole theory respecting fallen angels rests upon two verses,[[563]] each in one of the most doubtful of the New Testament writings: indeed the texts can scarcely be regarded as constituting two independent authorities; for the latter is little else than a repetition of the former; occurring in a portion of the second epistle of Peter, which, strangely enough, contains, the sentiments and even the language of a large part of the epistle of Jude. When such evidence as this is brought forward, as conclusive and infallible, I would respectfully ask our opponents, whether they seriously believe, on the authority of the same epistle, that Michael the archangel disputed with the Devil about the body of Moses? and as this is nowhere else mentioned, whether an express and personal revelation of the fact was imparted to St. Jude? If so, consistency would require them to maintain, that this is one of the essential doctrines of the Gospel: for how much soever our natural and corrupt reason might be tempted to think the circumstance trivial, if true, it cannot really be otherwise than fundamental, if privately and explicitly revealed.[[564]]
From the foregoing remarks, the general principles, in conformity with which I would treat the question of demoniacal possessions, will be so evident, that it will be unnecessary to enter into any details. The precise relation to each other of the various orders of evil spirits in which the Jews believed, it is not possible to define. It is certain, however, that they made a distinction, which our common translation of the Scriptures has improperly obliterated, between demons and devils. The former were thought to be of only human rank, the souls of the wicked dead: and it was these only that were supposed to possess and afflict the bodies of the living. The latter were guilty angels, and had no agency assigned to them on earth, being kept in durance within the prisons of the unseen world. There was therefore the same difference between demons and devils, as with us between ghosts and fiends. Of the former, Beelzebub was considered as the chief; of the latter, Satan: and whether these beings were regarded as standing in any definite relation to each other, is uncertain; probably the Devil, as the Prince of darkness, was believed to be the ruler of all the powers of evil, whether human or angelic. Unlike his incarcerated compeers, Satan was permitted to be at large, and to practise his arts against mankind: all gentile kingdoms being absolutely his; and even the chosen people not protected wholly from his malignity, at least until the Messiah’s reign, which was to commence with his dethronement. It may be observed by any careful reader of the gospels, that the evils of which he was held to be the author, are not the same that are ascribed to Beelzebub and his demons. Satan, and he only, was the moral seducer: and the physical calamities proceeding from him were only natural and intelligible diseases, regular enough to fall under the cognizance of science. The demons had, on the contrary, no concern with the conscience; and occasioned only the irregular and apparently preternatural maladies, which science deserted and left to the tender mercies of superstition;—of which epilepsy and insanity are the most remarkable examples.