Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/175

 So reasonable is the view here presented, and so much more satisfactory than the Old doctrine, that we are not surprised to find it beginning to be accepted by some of the acutest minds and profoundest thinkers even among those commonly reputed orthodox. To cite here, by way of illustration, a single passage from that most fascinating work, Nature and the Supernatural, from the pen of Dr. Horace Bushnell, unquestionably one of the ablest theologians in America. Speaking of the doctrine of the Manichees or disciples of Zoroaster, this writer says:

"If their good principle, called God by us, is taken as a being, and their bad principle as only a condition privative; one as a positive and real cause, the other as a bad possibility that environs God from eternity, waiting to become a fact and certain to become a fact when the opportunity is given, it is even so. And then it folllows that the moment God creates a realm of powers, the bad possibility as certainly becomes a bad actuality, Satan, or Devil, in esse; not a bad omnipresence over against God, and his equal—that is a monstrous and horrible conception—but an outbreaking evil or empire of evil in created spirits, according to their order. For Satan, or the Devil, taken in the singular, is not the name of any particular person, neither is it a personation merely of temptation, or impersonal evil, as many insist; for there is really no such thing as impersonal in the sense of moral evil: but the name is a name that