Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/410

396 is represented as omnipotent and the Devil as eternal. Milton has expressed this view of the subject with the sublimest pathos.

It is commonly said that the Devil has only precisely so much power as is allowed him by God's providence. Christians exhort each other to despise his attacks, and to trust in God. If this trust has ever been deceived, they seem in a poor way, especially when it is considered that God has arranged it so that the Devil should have no inconsiderable portion of the souls of men. A pious friend of mine tells me that she thinks that about nineteen in twenty will be damned. Formerly it was supposed that all those who were not Christians, and even all those who were not of a particular sect of Christians, would be damned. At present this doctrine seems abandoned or confined to a few. One does not well see who is to be damned, and who not according to the fashionable creed.

The sphere of the operations of the Devil is difficult to determine. The late inventions and improvements in telescopes have considerably enlarged the notions of men respecting the bounds of the universe. It is discovered that the Earth is comparatively a small globe, in a system consisting of a multitude of others, which roll round the sun; and there is no reason to suppose but that all these are inhabited by organized and intelligent beings. The fixed stars are supposed to be suns, each of them the centre of a system like ours. Those little whitish specks of light that are seen in a clear night, are discovered to consist of a prodigious multitude of suns, each probably the centre of a system of planets. The system of which our earth is a planet has been discovered to belong to