Dante makes the creation of angels simultaneous with that of the universe at large. “The fall of the rebel angels he considers to have taken place within twenty seconds of their creation, and to have originated in the pride which made Lucifer unwilling to await the time prefixed by his Maker for enlightening him with perfect knowledge”—see Rossetti, Shadow of Dante, 14, 15. Milton, unlike Dante, puts the creation of angels ages before the creation of man. He tells us that Satan’s first name in heaven is now lost. The sublime associations with which Milton surrounds the adversary diminish our abhorrence of the evil one. Satan has been called the hero of the Paradise Lost. Dante’s representation is much more true to Scripture. But we must not go to the extreme of giving ludicrous designations to the devil. This indicates and causes scepticism as to his existence. In mediæval times men’s minds were weighed down by the terror of the spirit of evil. It was thought possible to sell one’s soul to Satan, and such compacts were written with blood. Goethe represents Mephistopheles as saying to Faust: “I to thy service here agree to bind me, To run and never rest at call of thee; When _over yonder_ thou shalt find me, Then thou shalt do as much for me.” The cathedrals cultivated and perpetuated this superstition, by the figures of malignant demons which grinned from the gargoyles of their roofs and the capitals of their columns, and popular preaching exalted Satan to the rank of a rival god—a god more feared than was the true and living God. Satan was pictured as having horns and hoofs—an image of the sensual and bestial—which led Cuvier to remark that the adversary could not devour, because horns and hoofs indicated not a carnivorous but a ruminant quadruped. But there is certainly a possibility that the ascending scale of created intelligences does not reach its topmost point in man. As the distance between man and the lowest forms of life is filled in with numberless gradations of being, so it is possible that between man and God there exist creatures of higher than human intelligence. This possibility is turned to certainty by the express declarations of Scripture. The doctrine is interwoven with the later as well as with the earlier books of revelation.