licitly, held and
occasionally acted upon by the immense majority of Christians of all
confessions.

Only here and there has the progress of scientific thought, outside the
ecclesiastical world, so far affected Christians, that they and their
teachers fight shy of the demonology of their creed. They are fain to
conceal their real disbelief in one half of Christian doctrine by
judicious silence about it; or by flight to those refuges for the
logically destitute, accommodation or allegory. But the faithful who fly
to allegory in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so much as the
sheep in the fable who--to save their lives--jumped into the pit. The
allegory pit is too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much more than
one wants to put into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory;
if the early recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the demons is an
allegory; if the plain declaration of the writer of the first Epistle of
John (iii. 8), "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might
destroy the works of the devil," is allegorical, then the Pauline
version of the Fall may be allegorical, and still more the words of
consecration of the Eucharist, or the promise of the second coming; in
fact, there is not a dogma of ecclesiastical Christianity the scriptural
basis of which may not be whittled away by a similar process.

As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the New Testament
ask himself whether Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can be
dishonoured more grossly than by the supposition that they said and did
that which is attributed to them; while, in reality, they disbelieved in
Satan and his demons, in possession and in exorcism?[59]

An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no right to look
at the propositions of the Christian faith with one eye open and the
other shut. (Tract 85, p. 29.) It really is not permissible to see, with
one eye, that Jesus is affirmed to declare the personality and the
Fatherhood of God, His loving providence and His accessibility to
prayer; and to shut the other to the no less definite teaching ascribed
to Jesus, in regard to the personality and the misanthropy of the devil,
his malignant watchfulness, and his subjection to exorcistic formulae and
rites. Jesus is made to say that the devil "was a murderer from the
beginning" (John viii. 44) by the same authority as that upon which we
depend for his asserted declaration that Go