ether 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[86] 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 implicitly, 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 scr