Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 03.djvu/393

LEFT DEVIL 339 DEVIL his brethren in the heavenly court, with the special function of the accuser of men, like the personification of a guilty conscience. In the vision of Zechariah we find him considered formally as the accuser of Israel. Undoubtedly also this conception had already become greatly modified during the period of exile by contact with Persian aualism. Of course such a conception as Ahriman, the mighty author of evil and the antagonist almost on equal terms of Ormuzd, was completely foreign to Jewish monothe- ism, yet the Jewish Satan grew greatly both in definiteness and in power under his shadow, and henceforth it is from him directly that moral and physical harm toward men proceeds. Persian influence appears most plainly in the apocryphal books of Tobit and Baruch, but the gro^vth of the conception of the devil is seen also in the transla- tion of the LXX., which renders his name by diabolos, thus emphasizing and per- petuating his special function as the ac- cuser. Now also he becomes located in his gloomy kingdom of hell, and is at- tended by troops of inferior fiends. He wages warfare on mankind by inflicting physical and moral evil, and is consid- ered as the agent by whose means man fell from his original state of innocence. In the New Testament the conception of the personality of the devil and of a kingdom of demons holds its ground, but the whole subject is here treated with a kind of spiritual reserve, in a teaching that emphasizes our own hearts and their inward temptations as the source of our evil thoughts and deeds, and connects moral evil inseparably with the earthly nature of man. The passages which speak of a fall of angelic beings (II Peter ii: 4; Jude 6) occur in scriptures of subordinate canonical rank: Jesus no- where defines concretely the function of the devil; and the few positive state- ments about him — that "he was a mur- derer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth," that "he is a liar" (John viii: 44), and "sinneth from the begin- ning" (John iii: 8), scarcely furnish a sufficient foundation for a complete doc- trine on this subject. Yet the impressive manner in which it is dwelt on by our Lord and His apostles shows that it is a necessary part of Christian teaching. The early theologians were more lit- eral and less spiritual in their concep- tions, and in their horror of heathen institutions came to identify the king- dom of the devil in a particular manner with polytheism and the persecution they suflTered under the Roman empire. Thus the devil again became a kind of rival ol God, wholly unequal but yet formidable. The early Christians con- sidered the gods of heathenism as in- deed conquered by Christ, but yet not rendered wholly powerless, for as de- graded demons and with intent to de- ceive they uttered oracles, and were present at sacrifices, inhaling the sacrifi- cial incense — an idea in perfect harmony with the growing materialistic concep- tion of the devils, and of hell their res- idence, a place blazing with eternal fire, and filled with every horror the imagina- tion could suggest. Exaggerated ideas of the devil's dan- gerous power prevailed throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, whose deep, melancholy faith and fantastic theory of the universe generated saints natu- rally on the one nand and witches and sorcerers as naturally on the other. It was an involuntary exercise of the poetic faculty, through which the thoughts o€ their own hearts and of their own time became spirits, which they saw around them. Throughout the Middle Ages the devil was an absorbing idea, and the constant familiarity with him often brought with it a penalty of contempt. In the old religious plays a principal part was usually assigned to him, and indeed he principally represented the comic element, as may still be seen in the pastorales of the Basques. The decadence of belief in the active external power of the devil was mainly due to the indirect effect of the Re- formation and the progress of science. To no man was the devil ever more present than to Luther, but neverthe- less it was mainly the movement he in- augurated that has driven the enemy back into the sphere of the abstract and the ideal. In later generations the sense of the supernatural has steadily de- cayed, and with it almost all the ter- rors of the devil; but it cannot be said that with it has also disappeared a genuine religious spirit. The Christian man in the conscious weakness of his struggle against indwelling sin feels that he has no need to conjure up for him- self an external suggester of tempta- tion — he has devil enough in the treach- erous inclinations of his own heart. Kant (in 1793) defined the devil as the personification oi "radical evil." Schleier- macher held that ssnr^bolic reference to the devil might fitly have a place in Christian discourse, but denied the pos- sibility of his real existence, and in this he has been followed by Schenkel, Bieder- mann, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, and others. On the other hand the orthodox view is maintained more or less definitely by Liicke. Von Hofmann, Luthardt, Rothe, Julius Miiller, Martensen, and Domer, who hold that though the doctrine can-