Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/396

 3S0 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. food of these beings was the suffering of the damned, and human salvation their most exquisite torment. To effect their objects human agents were indispensable, and Satan was always ready to impart a portion of his power, or to consign a subordinate demon, to any one who would serve him. Thus a dualist ic system sprang up, less hopeful and inspiring than that of Zarathustra Spitama, which in its vivid realization of the ever-present and ever-acting Evil Principle, cast a sombre shadow over the kindly teachings of Christ. Some even held that human affairs were governed by demons, and this belief grew sufficiently prevalent to induce Chrysostom to undertake its refutation. He admitted that they were inspired with a fierce and irreconcilable hatred for man, with whom they carried on an immortal war, but he argued that the evil of the world was the just punishment inflicted by God.* Man thus lived surrounded by an infinite world of spirits, good and bad, whose sole object was his salvation or his perdition, and who were ever on the watch to save him or to lure him to destruc- tion. Thus was solved the eternal problem of the origin of evil, which has perplexed the human soul since it first began to think, and thus grew up a demonology of immense detail which formed part of the articles of faith. Almost every race has shared in such belief, whether the evil spirits were of supernatural origin, as with the Mazdeans and Assyrians, or whether, as with the Buddhists and Egyptians, they were the souls of the damned seeking to gratify their vindictiveness. Although Greece and Eome had no such distinctive class, yet had they peopled the world with a countless number of genii and inferior supernatural beings, who were accepted by Christianity and placed at the service of Satan. As theology grew to be a science in which every detail of the dealings of God with man was defined with the most rigid pre- cision, it became necessary to determine the nature and functions of the spirit world with exactitude, and the ardent intellects which framed the vast structure of orthodoxv did not shrink from the Idololat. x.— Lactant. Divin. Instit. n. 9. — Augustin. de vera Relig. c. 13, c. 40 No. 75; De Genesi ad Litt. xi. 13, 17, 22. 27; Sermon. Append. No. 278 (Edit. Benedict.).— Gregor. PP. I. Moral, in Job iv. 13, 17, 32.— Cbrysostom. de Imbe- cillitate Diaboli Homil. I. No. 6.
 * Minuc. Felicis Octavius (Mag. Bib. Pat. Ed. 1618, III. 7, 8).— Tertull. de