The King then commands him to try and to destroy his possessions. (N.B.—This is a mistake, He gives him leave.)
Again on another day the same things happen and when the officer is asked about Job he says ‘He is yet integer but many men will do this. I can say nothing for his integrity as long as his possessions only are touched; but stretch out your hand against his person and see if he will curse Thee then?’ It is evident that there is no suggestion, no evil in the officer at all—indeed the belief in Angels and that sort of poultry is nowhere countenanced in the Old Testament and in the New, nowhere else.
F. Indeed, Sir, I think I know a very strong passage.
C. Well, what is it?
F. Our Saviour tells his disciples when alone with them and apart that a certain kind of Devils goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.
C. Well, and what has that to do with Angels?
F. I beg your pardon, Sir. I thought you included devils in your feathered fowl.
C. There is nothing I say in the New Testament to countenance the belief in Angels. For what are the three first Gospels? Every one must see that they are mere plain narrations, not of things as they are but of things as they appeared to the ignorant disciples—but when we come to John, Mr. F., there we find the difference. He told things as they were, and therefore you must not believe everything that you read implicitly; and with respect to Devils entering into a man, why it is quite absurd. What do we mean when we say a thing is in another? Why ‘in’ is merely a relative term. [The argument, though I was compelled to assent to it, I am sorry to say was far above my comprehension, and therefore I could not catch it, still less bag it and carry it away,—however it proved that there could be no Devils and still less could there be Devils in a man.] Spirit therefore was not more in a man than it was out of him, the mistake arising from a misconception of the word in. As for all notions of men with wings, of course they are absurd in the extreme.
I return however to ‘Faust.’
F. Did you ever see Shelley’s translation of the Chorus in ‘Faust’ you were just mentioning?