Bekker must have found it difficult to resist passages so formal. However, he was even more inflexible on the subject of devils than on that of angels; he would not be subdued by the Book of Enoch, the seventh man from Adam; he maintained that there was no more a devil than there was a book of Enoch. He said that the devil was imitated from ancient mythology, that it was an old story revived, and that we are nothing more than plagiarists.
We may at the present day be asked why we call that Lucifer the evil spirit, whom the Hebrew version, and the book attributed to Enoch, named Samyaza. It is because we understand Latin better than Hebrew.
But whether Lucifer be the planet Venus, or the Samyaza of Enoch, or the Satan of the Babylonians, or the Mozazor of the Indians, or the Typhon of the Egyptians, Bekker was right in saying that so enormous a power ought not to be attributed to him as that with which, even down to our own times, he has been believed to be invested. It is too much to have immolated to him a woman of quality of Würzburg, Magdalen Chaudron, the curate of Gaupidi, the wife of Marshal d'Ancre, and more than a hundred thousand other wizards and witches, in the space of thirteen hundred years, in Christian states. Had Belthazar Bekker been content with paring the devil's nails, he would have been very well received; but when a curate would annihilate the devil he loses his cure.
BELIEF.
We shall see at the article "Certainty" that we ought often to be very uncertain of what we are certain of; and that we may fail in good sense when deciding according to what is called common sense. But what is it that we call believing?
A Turk comes and says to me, "I believe that the angel Gabriel often descended from the empyrean, to bring Mahomet leaves of the Koran, written on blue vellum."
Well, Mustapha, and on what does thy shaven head found its belief of this incredible thing?
"On this: That there are the greatest probabilities that I have not been deceived in the relation of these improbable prodigies; that Abubeker, the father-in-law, Ali, the son-in-law, Aisha, or Aisse, the daughter, Omar, and Osman, certified the truth of the fact in the presence of fifty thousand men—gathered together all the leaves, read them to the faithful, and attested that not a word had been altered.
"That we have never had but one Koran, which has never been contradicted by another Koran. That God has never permitted the least alteration to be made in this book.