Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Agnosticism; Miracles; Religion and science
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 whether 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. Mediæval 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.
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