the giants and other monsters that infested the antediluvian earth; by their evil communications, the human race was so depraved as to be incapacitated for rendering acceptable service to the Creator, and was therefore swept away by the deluge. 81 83 Demons were also the offspring of this connection. They are, according to some, a separate class of beings;8 while others suppose them to be the souls of the giants. These beings are not material, though they take their nature from matter, but spiritual, like fire and air.85 To this nature, both their parent angels, and those of the Satanic fall, are perfectly assimilated; for having been excluded from heaven by their transgressions, they are no longer able to elevate themselves to heavenly things, but hover about the earth and air.87 This innumerable host of demons and angel-demons are entirely under the control and guidance of Satan,88 "the angel of wickedness, the author of all error, the corrupter of all generations; who, having, at the first, tempted man to transgress the divine law, and made him, therefore, liable to death, infused the seeds of all sins into his posterity: thus rendering them also obnoxious to his own 81 Irenæus lib. 5. c. 70. 82 Justin Apol. II, 44. B.; Tert. Apol. c. 22. 83 Athen. u. s. p. 28. A. 84 Tatian contra Græc. 151. c. 85 Id. 154. C. 86 Idem 147. A., &c. Tertullian seems to have considered the assimilation not quite complete. He says the demons are more wicked than their parents. Apol. c. 22. 87 Athenagoras u. s. According to Tatian, they sojourned among the different animals that inhabit the earth and the waters; and in order to deceive mankind into the idea that they were still celestial, they introduced these their companions into the Zodiack. Contra Græc. 147. A. 88 Tertullian u. s. punishment."89 Between this prince and his subordinates, there is the most perfect unity of design and of action. Their one motive is hatred to man; their one object, his temporal and eternal perdition: and for the accomplishment of this purpose, the subtilty and tenuity of their natures furnish them with fearful facilities. They are able to possess themselves of the bodies of men, afflicting them with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death; and of their mental faculties, in the case of demoniasm. They have likewise power over the elements, which they always exercise to annoy and distress the unhappy objects of their antipathy, by raising storms and blights to destroy the fruits of the earth.90 ness. But these fallen beings use their most strenuous exertions to effect the destruction of the soul: and therefore, are incessantly devising temptations, whereby they may allure mankind to the commission of acts of wickedNor are their powers of mischief limited to mere external provocations: they can, at all times, transfuse themselves into those secret recesses of thought where the motives of human action originate; and they suggest the evil motions, which produce murders, wars, adultery, and the long catalogue of crimes wherewith man offends his Maker.91 Of all sins, however, that of idolatry appears most readily to have accomplished their wicked purposes; into this, therefore, they were the most earnest and unremitting in their efforts to seduce their victims.92 In putting men 89 Idem de Testimonio Animæ, c. 3. 90 Idem Apol. c. 22.; de Spect. c. 2. 91 Justin Apol. I, p. 61.; Apol. II, p. 48. A.; Tertullian ubi supra ; Tatian contra Græcos, 154. C. 92 Justin Apol. I, 61. A.; Tert. Apol. c. c. 23, 27.; Tatian u. s. 152. B.; Athen. leg. 29. B. C. 93 upon these courses, they were actuated by the ambition of their prince, to be worshipped as God; a passion in which themselves also largely participated. They had, besides, another and more intelligible object in view.-The blood of the victims and the odours that arose from the consuming flesh and incense, in the sacrificial acts which they prescribed as the mode wherein they would be worshipped, were the proper food of the fallen angels and demons;94 and, of course, its quantity and quality depended upon the number and rank of their votaries. To effect this, they possessed the statues of deceased mortals; deluding mankind into the belief that they were deities,95 by means of the various supernatural operations which were performed, apparently by the idols, but really through their agency. 96 But their most efficacious mode of keeping up the credit of the various images, under the forms and names of which they were worshipped as gods, was the utterance of oracular responses.97 They obtained the knowledge which enabled them frequently to declare very astonishing and startling facts, to those who enquired at their shrines, by the inconceivable rapidity of their movements. They are all furnished with wings, and such are their powers of flight, that the world is but as one place to them, for they are every where in a moment; and as they are perpetually 93 Iren. lib. 3. c. c. 24, 25. His authority for this is Matt. iv. 8, 9. 95 Justin Apol. I, 55. E., 57. D., &c.; Tert. de Spect. c. 10.; and in many other places. 96 The demons had no names but of these fabulous deities.-Justin Apol. I, 55. E., &c.; Tert. de Idol. c. 15. Athenagoras contends that the gods of the heathen were dead men, and the demons merely haunted them. -Leg. 31. A., &c. 97 Tatian ubi supra, 152. B. passing to and fro in the region of the air, they are able to apprise their votaries of events in one country, the instant they are transacted in another.98 This velocity passed with mankind for divinity. For the same purpose, of deluding the sons of Adam, and drawing them on to their eternal perdition, they taught them certain ceremonies in their mistaken worship, which bore a strong resemblance to those of Judaism, and even of Christianity.99 Nay, the divine truths, with which their insight into the Almighty's dispensations had furnished them during their perfect state,100 they made subservient to their illusions, by disclosing them under a mutilated form, and thus obtained credit for virtue as well as divinity.101 The advent of our Lord, produced important changes in the condition of the evil angels, by greatly curtailing their power of deceiving mankind. The blasphemous heresies of the second century are declared, by the cotemporary fathers, to have been the direct expressions of the rage which possessed the devil and his angels, when they discovered, from the preaching of Christ and his apostles, that they were doomed to eternal torment: of this they had before been ignorant, and therefore had not gone to the same extent of blasphemy.102 Our spiritual enemies, however, are still sufficiently formidable, both in their powers of evil and in their numbers. They swarm in every element; they throng the universe; they make mankind the objects of their individual and personal, as well as of their general, malignity. Every human being is attended by an evil demon, 103 as well as by his guardian angel, through life. Nor can even our eternal salvation save us from apprehensions of suffering from them, in a future state; for at the hour of death, a struggle takes place, between the good angel and the evil one, for the soul of their charge ; and if the latter prevails, as is frequently the case, even with the departed spirits of good men, it remains from thence until the day of judgment, so under the control of the demons, as to be compelled to do their bidding." 104 Our protectors against all these machinations to accomplish our ruin are the holy angels; who, in numbers equal to those of their antagonists, are engaged incessantly in defending from their assaults, that universe, the particular providential dispensations of which, they administer as free agents; responsible only to God for the use or abuse of the divine power delegated to them. The performance of these duties calls the host of heaven to a state of interminable warfare with the infernal legions,-a warfare, which combines all the horrors of a personal combat, with those of a general battle. To enable them successfully to cope with their enemies, a most exact system of discipline and subordination was deemed, by our authors, indispensible. Individual angels are specially deputed to preside over each of the operations of providence; the angel of death,105 for instance, and the angel of ven 103 Tert. de Animâ, c. 57.; Apol. c. 46. 104 Justin Dial. 322. C. -Tert. de Animâ, c. 53,: his authority 105 Angelus evocator animarum. for this fiction was probably the άγγελος θανατοφορος of the Septuagint version; see Job xx. 15., &c. |