Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/398

384 improvement without which present evil would he intolerable. The vulgar are all Manichæans—all that remains of the popular superstition is mere Machinery and accompaniment. To abstract in contemplation, from our sensations of pleasure and pain, all circumstance and limit; to add those active powers, of whose existence we are conscious within ourselves; to give to that which is most pleasing to us, a perpetual or an ultimate superiority, with all epithets of honourable addition; and to brand that which is displeasing with epithets ludicrous or horrible, predicting its ultimate defeat, is to pursue the process by which the vulgar arrive at the familiar notions of God and the Devil.

The Devil was clearly a Chaldæan invention, for we first hear of him after the return of the Jews from their second Assyrian captivity. He is, indeed, mentioned in the Book of Job; but, so far from that circumstance affording any proof that that Book was written at a very early period, it tends rather to shew that it was the production of a later age. The magnificence and purity, indeed, of the poetry, and the irresistible grandeur of its plan, suggest the idea that it was a birth of the vigorous infancy of some community of men. Assuredly it was not written by a Jew before the period of the second captivity,—because it speaks of the Devil, and there is no other mention of this personage in the voluminous literature of that epoch. And that it was not written by a Jew at all may be presumed, from a perpetual employment, and that with the most consummate beauty, of imagery belonging to a severer climate than Palestine.

But to return to the Devil.—Those among the Greek