along with
the wicked whom they have seduced to their destruction, be hurled into
the abyss of unquenchable fire--there to endure continual torture,
without a hope of winning pardon from the merciful God, their Father; or
of moving the glorified Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession;
or even of interrupting, by a momentary sympathy with their
wretchedness, the harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men,
eternally lapped in bliss unspeakable.

The straitest Protestant, who refuses to admit the existence of any
source of Divine truth, except the Bible, will not deny that every point
of the pneumatological theory here set forth has ample scriptural
warranty. The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse assert
the existence of the devil, of his demons and of Hell, as plainly as
they do that of God and his angels and Heaven. It is plain that the
Messianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of these books are
the obverse and the reverse of the same intellectual coinage. If we turn
from Scripture to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of
the Churches, it will appear that, in this one particular, at any rate,
time has brought about no important deviation from primitive belief.
From Justin onwards, it may often be a fair question whether God, or the
devil, occupies a larger share of the attention of the Fathers. It is
the devil who instigates the Roman authorities to persecute; the gods
and goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an
invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by the
seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has suggested it;
and some of the Fathers[58] go so far as to challenge the pagans to a
sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of Christianity.
Mediaeval Christianity is at one with patristic, on this head. The
masses, the clergy, the theologians, and the philosophers alike, live
and move and have their being in a world full of demons, in which
sorcery and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor did the Reformation
make any difference. Whatever else Luther assailed, he left the
traditional demonology untouched; nor could any one have entertained a
more hearty and uncompromising belief in the devil, than he and, at a
later period, the Calvinistic fanatics of New England did. Finally, in
these last years of the nineteenth century, the demonological hypotheses
of the first century are, explicitly or imp