“Black spirits and white,
Red spirits and gray,
Mingle, mingle, mingle,
You that mingle may.”
Such, if put into a coherent shape, would be, we think, Mr. Fiske’s mode of explaining his belief. To him all mystery is myth, and the one true guide is scientific faith.
There is no mention of Revelation from beginning to end of the book: the author evidently does not believe in it. But though he is careful not to say so in express words, the meaning of all his deductions is very clear; and passages from the sacred Scriptures are contorted to suit his purpose.
Thus, we are told[70] that “the very idea of an archfiend, Satan, which Christianity received from Judaism, seems to have been suggested by the Persian Ahriman, or at least to have derived its principal characteristics from that source. There is no evidence that the Jews, previous to the Babylonish captivity, possessed the conception of a devil as the author of all evil. In the earlier books of the Old Testament, Jehovah is represented as dispensing with his own hand the good and the evil, like the Zeus of the Iliad.”
Of course, to a man of Mr. Fiske’s vast knowledge and profound erudition, it would be an impertinence to suggest that, as the name—the mere name, apart from all belief in it—Jehovah is the more ancient of the two, it might have been more in order to invert its position, so that it would run: “The Zeus of the Iliad, like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, was the dispenser of good and evil.” But Mr. Fiske studiously sets Jehovah first in place, though second in time, giving one to understand thereby that Zeus was his precursor. This may have been done inadvertently, but, if so, there is a strange method in Mr. Fiske’s carelessness. He is clearly a believer in that
“Divinity which doth shape our ends,
Rough hew them as we may.”
Then, again, Mr. Fiske is correct enough in the passages which he cites as showing that the Jehovah of the Old Testament dispenses “with his own hand the good and the evil.” There is nothing startling in this: it is the soundest Catholic as well as Jewish doctrine. We believe that God does dispense the good and the evil alike; but the “dispensing of the good and the evil” is a very different thing from the phrase which concludes the preceding sentence: “The author of all evil.” Mr. Fiske plumes himself on his philological knowledge; he is great in word-science, if we may so call it; does he, then, recognize no distinction between “a dispenser” and “an author,” or again, between evil and evil, or still further, between “evil” and “all evil”?
“Evil is natural and moral,” says the dictionary. In the first sense, it means what we generally comprehend by the word “misfortune”; as, evil tidings, evil news, evil accident. In this sense, God is said to be the dispenser of evil; that is, of trials which he sets his children, as a father sets his son a hard task, to prepare them, to test them, to educate them, to lift them up to the fulness of manhood, which is in God. “Whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth.” But “moral evil” or what Mr. Fiske calls “all evil,” is a very different thing. It is that which is evil naturally, in se and per se, which is in the will of the devil, and which it is blasphemy to attribute to God. Evil in the first sense may be, is generally, good in itself: the latter, never. It may not be blasphemy in Mr. Fiske, for, as we said, he does not, from insufficient acquaintance with the subject, know the meaning of his own words. But observe how carefully all these words are placed in connection and juxtaposition one with another, and how easily each slides into its wrong place. Again, there is a singular method in Mr. Fiske’s glaring—for a milder term in the face of what we have just pointed out would be impossible—inaccuracies.
He goes on: “The story of the serpent in Eden—an Aryan story in every particular, which has crept into the Pentateuch—is not once alluded to in the Old Testament.” To this he adds a note: “Nor is there any ground for believing that the serpent in the Eden-myth is intended for Satan?” Though Mr. Fiske is overrunning our space far more than we intended he should do at the beginning, the next sentence is too good to omit, as replete with a piece of criticism unique in its simplicity and loftiness of tone: “The identification (of the serpent in the Eden-myth with Satan) is entirely the work of modern dogmatic theology, and is due, naturally enough, to the habit, so common alike among theologians and laymen, of reasoning about the Bible as if it were a single book (!), and not a collection of writings of different ages and of very different degrees of historic authenticity.”