ll parts of the universe, except the heaven. These bad
spirits are far superior to man in power and subtlety; and their whole
energies are devoted to bringing physical and moral evils upon him,
and to thwarting, so far as his power goes, the benevolent intentions
of the Supreme Being. In fact, the souls and bodies of men form both
the theatre and the prize of an incessant warfare between the good and
the evil spirits--the powers of light and the powers of darkness. By
leading Eve astray, Satan brought sin and death upon mankind. As the
gods of the heathen, the demons are the founders and maintainers of
idolatry; as the "powers of the air" they afflict mankind with
pestilence and famine; as "unclean spirits" they cause disease of mind
and body.

The significance of the appearance of Jesus, in the capacity of the
Messiah, or Christ, is the reversal of the satanic work by putting an
end to both sin and death. He announces that the kingdom of God is at
hand, when the "Prince of this world" shall be finally "cast out"
(John xii. 31) from the cosmos, as Jesus, during his earthly career,
cast him out from individuals. Then will Satan and all his devilry,
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 wh