THE DEVIL.

highest and intensest moral feeling of almost every age L has been, and partly remains, passionately attached to that militant conception of good which seems absolutely to crave a distinct personality in the spiritual evil with which it contends, in order to call forth the full resisting power of the human con- science. The belief in a personal spirit of evil, so ridiculous to the men of science of the day, so difficult even to the theologians, finds stronger and more earnest advocates among some of those who have the fullest sympathy with the deepest currents of modern thought, than among those more textual and orthodox critics of the Bible who while admitting the presence of this belief in the Old and still more clearly in the New Testament, yet keep it as much as they can in the background. Mr. Maurice, in a book just published (to which we shall presently refer more at length), on The Conflict of Good and Evil in Our Day,* shows a belief in a personal spirit of evil only less profound than his belief in the God who is to bind that ' strong one;' and even the late Mr. Robertson, who reflected more anxiously the tendencies of modern culture' than Mr. Maurice, but whose whole concep- tion of spiritual life was always a warlike one, says on this subject :—" Our salvation does not depend on our having right notions about the Devil, but right feelings about God. And if you hate evil you are on God's side, whether there be a personal evil principle or not. I myself believe there is, but not so unques- tionably as to be able to say I think it a matter of clear revelation. The Bible does reveal God, and except with a belief in God there will and can be no goodness. But I can conceive intense hatred of wrong with great uncertainty whether there be a Devil or not. Indeed many persons who believe in a Devil are worse instead of better for their belief, since they throw the responsibility of their acts off themselves on him. Do not torment yourselves with such

• Smith, Elder, and Co.

questions. The simpler ones are the deeper." It is curious, too, that the greatest of the true modern poets, especially Goethe,- whatever he may have believed as a part of his spiritual creed if he had one,—battled stoutly, as an artist, for a personal spirit of evil, and always spoke of his Mephistopheles not as an invention of his own imagination, but as a piece of accurate 'spiritual deline- ation carefully drawn from a large store of moral (or immoral) expe- rience. The truth of art at least required a Devil, Goethe thought, and a Devil who changed his manners and forms of temptation with the tone of the society he sought to corrupt and destroy, and hence the great "ironic" figure in Faust of the master spirit, whose life consists in negation,—" Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint,"—whose function it is to be always sounding the shallowness—touching the selfish bottom—of every vein of apparently disinterested feeling, exposing the animal coarseness of every mood of apparently pure sentiment, the mean and noisy vulgarity of all apparently good.. fellowship, the covert blasphemy in religious thought, theater hope- lessness and imbecility in all noble effort. Other great poets, later at least, if not more truly modern in the structure of their minds, than Goethe, have felt the same artistic necessity laid upon them of identifying the thread of evil which runs through all modern practice and speculation, and attributing to it a sort of provisional personality. But it is especially remarkable that the sense of close and almost inextricable affinity between good and evil has in- creased of late years, and that the latest and greatest thinkers in pourtraying devilish temptations addressed to the highest kinds of mind, propose the doubt whether they are at bottom pure evil after all ; whether the conflict thus represented is not the conflict between the tender conscience and the world,—the over- tender conscience of course exaggerating the wickedness of the world. They question whether it is really the world which is so bad or the human conscience which is so scrupulous :— " 'What we all love is good touched up with evil,

Religion's self must have a spice of Devil."

And plunged in still profounder waves of doubt, a modern poet and thinker suggests :—

"The Devil oft the Holy Scripture uses, But God can act the Devil when he chooses."

In the volume to which we have referred Mr. Maurice avails himself of this growing tendency to emphasize the difficulty of discriminating good from evil, and taking his occasion from that rhetorical discourse of the Bishop of Oxford's on the manifesta- tion of "the great Anti-Christ" expected by his Lordship, on which we commented some months ago,* Mr. Maurice follows the opposite line of thought to our own, and argues from the very fact of the close mingling of good and evil in our own day, and from the growing moral confusion between them, that the Bishop of Oxford is right in looking for a great spiritual crisis near at hand, in which the evil shall come more and more into direct and abso- lute antagonism with the good by which it is now obscured and diluted and held back from manifesting its natural consequences. In short we may describe this eloquent and impressive little book of Mr. Maurice's as a sort of exposition how very orthodox the Devil can be when he chooses in his creed, and how impossible it is to tell, by the mere outward form of any religious opinion, whether it is the natural expression of a faith in God, or the appropriate orthodox disguise (not intentional, but involuntary) of a sacrifice made to the spirit of evil under the form of a profes- sion of faith in God. We need not say to anybody who knows Mr. Maurice's writings that he charges himself with the tendency to the later kind of heresy far more freely than any of his neigh- bours, and appeals to God to preserve him from this sort of ortho- doxy, into which he believes that, without God's defence, human nature, by grace of the Devil, is always gravitating. We are not going to discuss now any of the questions of faith raised by Mr. Maurice. All we want to notice here is the curiously earnest belief—should it be called belief? certainly it is not trust,—in a personal evil principle which this book, representing no doubt a school of thought, throughout exhibits. Mr. Maurice evidently holds that the evil root to which much orthodoxy, and that, too, not inconsistent with true piety, may be traced, is almost inconceivable without a diabolic subtlety at the bottom of it. He holds that when St. Paul "verily thought within himselipthat he ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth," and avowed that in spite of his persecutions he had ".a conscience void of offence before God," he was not the less worshipping Anti-Christ instead of Christ, and that his con- version was, not quite but almost, as truly a turning of his heart from an evil to a good being as if he had been conscious that • See Spectator of 2nd S ember.

his Jewish dream of an ambitious and conquering Messiah was a bad dream, and not a good one. The conscience in such a case may be " void of offence," but it is because some evil principle has poisoned the conscience. In like manner Mr. Maurice asks us to believe that the moral confusions which many highly earnest persons, whether orthodox or heterodox, entertain as to the true nature and work of the Christ they worship, may be as truly due to an evil dream of their own as was St. Paul's zeal for a persecuting Jewish Messiah when he consented to Stephen's martyrdom. And Mr. Maurice explains this confusion in the human conscience by assuming an evil being who is always struggling with God's influence in our hearts, who no sooner sees a new and diviner personal faith than he breaks it up into opinionative dogmas that divide and destroy instead of reconciling and saving, but who is not the less doomed to contribute, in spite of himself, tothe more perfect establishment of God's kingdom. This appears to Mr. Maurice the true explanation at once of the great temporary con- fusion, and of the absolute antagonism, between good and evil. The confusion is due to the subtlety of an agency greater than our dis- cerning and discriminating power,—the true and inherent anta- gonism to the personal hatred felt by the evil principle, and from time to time compelled by God openly to manifest itself, for God and the essence of God's nature, which is Good.

This is a new and rather original aspect to give to the discus- sion concerning the personality of the evil principle. Hitherto the argument in its favour has usually been rested on the evidence for the existence of evil motives unalloyed with any good in the heart of man. Cruelty, for instance, for the sake of cruelty, the zest given to sin by the mere fact of its sinfulness, have been cited to prove that there must be some malignant personality external to man, since the appetites, passions, and impulses of ordinary human nature have been all shown by Bishop Butler and other great moral naturalists to contain no trace of any desire not in its origin, and within its proper limits, innocent, wholesome, and intended to answer some wise purpose, though capable of course of cruel perversions. This has been usually thought to prove the absence of any evil principle, properly so called, in human nature, and to show that moral evil consists in the disorder of human nature, not in any power foreign to human nature, and so has no doubt con- tributed much to weaken the once universal belief in a Devil. Mr. Maurice, however, though he agrees with Butler, draws the opposite conclusion. Disorder alone might only show that human wills are weak, but what of this tendency to find a deep spiritual apology for disorder, to find excuses for it in the very words in which thegreat principlesof order are revealed?—this tendency, for example, to undermine radically the very faith in God, and leave in place of it expedients for appeasing Him as an evil to be dreaded, instead of surrendering to Him as the only infinite good? —what of this tendency to substitute for the faith in Christ faith in the efficacy of our own faith, and so set up a right of our own about which we may wrangle, instead of a trust which leaves everything to Him? What of this inclination to talk of free thought as if, being really free, it could lead us away from the author of freedom,—to talk of free conscience as if it involved a freedom from obligation instead of freedom to dis- charge your obligations? In all these confusions Mr. Maurice finds the traces of a spiritual subtlety capable of blinding our eyes with the very instrument intended to couch them and yet with an art that leaves on the victim the impression that he has been couched,—which he does not hesitate to trace to evil purpose and evil design.

Yet after reading all which Mr. Maurice puts, and puts very powerfully, on this subject, and admitting that it does correspond with our own experience, and with the language of Christ him- self, the most, probably, that candid and conscientious thinkers will be able to say on the subject,—certainly the most which we could honestly say,—is pretty nearly what Mr. Robertson said,— that if we must have a theory of evil at all, this corresponds as nearly as any other to the facts of our inward life, that it represents at least the attitude of strong personal resist- ance in which we are always obliged to stand to the evil suggestions which so often throng into the heart, but that at most it is an uncertain account of a matter on which we have no occasion to make up our minds at all further than to determine our own attitudedn relation to evil. If there be a Devil, we are not called upon to trust but to resist him, and so long as we resist—and resist with that strong purpose which personal conflict excites—it is of no consequence to us, human or divine, whether it be an It or a Him against whom we fight the battle of the spirit. If there be a Devil, he is not the source of life but of destruction. Goethe makes his-Mephistopheles abhor all that is

really living, and praised De la Croix for delineating him in his midnight ride with Faust as mounted on a mere skeleton horse, that moves with no living motion, but only by the evil will of the rider, and the rider himself as offering no resistance to the tempest roaring around them, but sitting the image of cynical negative ease, while Faust's hair streams in the wind and his attitude betrays excite- ment and horror in every limb. And this no doubt is the true con- ception. If the cold thoughts which startle us all with the notions that virtue is a dream, and man a mere creation of dark or bright necessity, as the case may be, that when you have repeated the creed that sugar is sweet and ginger hot in the mouth you have almost exhausted the secret of human motives,—if such thoughts really come from a preternatural source at all, they require no more resistance and no other mode of dPsding with them, than they would if they originated in our own nature. They are tempters to us, whether they come from a great Tempter or not, and it cannot be a matter of any spiritual moment to make up one's mind on subject on which there is peculiar difficulty in making up one's mind at all. All questions of spiritual origin have a special difficulty for the present generation at least, and if we can honestly and heartily believe in God and adopt Christ's law of thought towards all evil, it surely is not our affair to do any more, and go into diabolical metaphysics for the sake of being able to say—for that is the whole difference it makes to us —I believe or I disbelieve in the personality of the Devil. If ever there were a question on which it is legitimate to wait patiently for a solution, that of the nature of the evil principle is one. If indeed we could do any good for the Devil, on clearly ascertaining his existence, the case would be altered. But pro- bably we have quite enough conversions on our hands, in relation to mixed good and evil at home and mixed good and evil abroad, without attacking pure evil anywhere. Indeed if a pure evil Being there be, the prospect of converting Him would be the pen- dant to Archimedes' prospect of moving the earth : there would be a capital chance of it, if you could once get a point inside him from which to begin.

As a mere spiritual theory we have never been able to assent to any of the arguments either for or against Satan as conclusive.

That Christ used personal language of the Devil is clear, but then he called Peter himself a Satan, when he deprecated with excusable eagerness the shameful death predicted for Himself by our Lord.

The account of the temptation is transparently an account of evil thoughts crossing our Lord's imagination, offering themselves for His acceptance, and summarily rejected. When He says, " I saw Satan like lightning fall from heaven," on occasion of the return of his disciples from their successful mission,—He probably referred to the picture in the book of Job of Satan accusing man to God of a weakness that would yield to the first temptation, and saw in vision the final discomfiture of such accusers. That the feeling of personal resistance to the spirit of evil represented to our lord the truest view of it, is clear; and we think it of infinite importance to hold by that feeling ;—but that would be the whole result to us even of knowing, if we could know, that the spirit of evil is a person, and more than a force to be resisted. That Christ him- self, in His human nature, held this view, we do not doubt ; but certainly He never revealed it as a truth to be grasped by us, or as one of inestimable value to human nature, as He did God's Father- hood and His own eternal union with the Father. Indeed His own language is hesitating. Sometimes He calls the spirit of evil ' the prince of this world,' sometimes, as we have seen, He applies the title of tempter to any human agency which is made the instru- ment of temptation, but after all, "Deliver us from evil" rather than "from the Devil" is the language that most accurately expresses his thought in prayer. It is evident that Christ's lan- guage on the Devil is no more part of his revelation than His lan- guage concerning the causes of fevers, epilepsy, and madness, which always accepted the popular belief in the theory of posses- sion. Unless we feel ourselves bound—es textualists do in word, but not, we imagine, in thought —to accept His language on the one subject as definitive, we cannot do so on the other, except so far as it shows us the true spiritual attitude of a perfect mind towards evil flashes of suggestion.

And if this ground of intellectual evidence fails to be convinc- ing, still more evidently do all others. There is none of that unity of plan about evil which there is about good,— on the contrary, all evil is discordant, and points, if anywhere, to discordant sources in the spiritual world. There may be a powerful reason for believing in Devils, but scarcely apy in one single Devil. The reign of evil has no mark of a single presiding will. As in human society there are certainly many tempters, not one,—so in our spiritual life, if there be any punctures received from outside our own per-

sonality at all, there is no more reason to refer them to one than to many assailants. The concurrence of divine purposes visible in the good of the universe points clearly to one fountain of good, but there is no such concurrence pointing to one fountain of evil.

On the whole, though we see no reason why those apparently causeless incursions of evil thoughts to which all men are liable, and which all men are able with God's help to resist, should not be sometimes due to disembodied, just as like incursions, the origin of which we know, and hear, or see, are clearly due to embodied, spirits, namely, our fellow men, — there is no sufficient reason for saying it is so, and no sufficient reason for making up our minds about it at all. The "shield of faith" wherewith St. Paul says we are able " to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked," is just as useful whether the wickedness originate with visible or invisible foes, and whether those invisible foes be foes personally distinct from ourselves, or only other forme of our own personality.

There seems to us to be no more necessary qualification for a theo- logian of the present day than the courage to decide what problems it is essential for his own spiritual life to solve, and what it is need- less to solve. That evil is personal—directly our wills yield to It, we know, and that the only refuge from it, the divine power which can alone deliver us, is personal, we also know. But that evil is personal before we absorb it into our own wills we do not know, though we know we should bear ourselves towards it exactly as if it were; nor does it seem to us even desirable to plunge our plummet further than this into the metaphysics of the Devil. Science, by giving peculiar sharpness and fixity to physical pheno- mena, has made moral phenomena seem even so much more uncer- tain than they really are, that it is by no means desirable to press inferences from them which they are not fully competent to bear. Still the a priori arguments against the possible existence of a Devil, and in favour of his immediate destruction by God if he existed, would go a good deal further than those who urge them suppose, and involve, in all probability, the non-existence or im- mediate destruction of numberless tempters, not invisible, and whose reality is not by any means open to doubt. In fine, we concur heartily in renouncing the Devil—whatever or whoever he may be—and all his works, for that is only renouncing evil, which we have to do every day of our lives. But as to acknowledging even his personality,—is not that almost too much like embodying him in our creed which would be a mistake even if he exists? Intel- lectually to ignore, morally to resist, him or it, as the case may be,—is not that the highest attainable attitude of the Christian mind towards evil ?