Page:The Natural History of the Christian Devil.pdf/8

 time much of their splendor. The very ingenuity with which they were afterwards invested with ugliness in religious art, attests that there were certain popular religious sentiments about them which had to be distinctly reversed. It was because they were thought beautiful that they must be painted ugly; it was because they were—even among converts to the new religion—still secretly believed to be kind and helpful, that there was employed such elaboration of hideous designs to deform them. These are not genuine demons or devils, but carefully caricatured deities. Who that looks upon the grinning bestial forms carved about the roof of any old church—as those on Melrose Abbey and York Cathedral—which, there is reason to believe, represent the primitive deities driven from the interior by potency of holy water, and chained to the uncongenial service of supporting the roof-gutter—can see in these gargoyles (Fr. gargouille, dragon), anything but carved imprecations? Was it to such ugly beings, guardians of their streams, hills, and forests, that our ancestors consecrated the holly and mistletoe, or with such that they associated their flowers, fruits, and homes? They were caricatures inspired by missionaries, made to repel and disgust, as the images of saints beside them were carved in beauty to attract. If the Pagans had been the artists, the good looks would have been on the other side" ("Demonology." M. D. Conway, vol. i., pp. 29—32). Strange and suggestive thought, that all Devils are dethroned Gods, and all reigning Gods Devils in embryo. As Zeus and Hermes, Isis and Osiris, Jupiter and Mercury, have passed first into Devils, and finally into acknowledged myths, so shall the Gods of the present in their turn fade away and dissolve into nonentity. But since men are wiser than of yore, the Christian Deities are likely to escape from being devilised as were their predecessors. The lineaments of the "Man of Sorrows" shall not be distorted into hideousness as were the fair faces of the elder Gods, for there will be no need to alienate the heart by ugliness when the brain has rejected all supernatural pretention. The Christian Trinity shall take its place in the Pantheon beside the rescued and restored forms of the Gods of old, and Gods and Devils shall alike be regarded as the dream-fancies of a child-world, some fair, some ugly, but all unworthy of credence in maturer life.