The same remark applies to the view which regards Satan as but a collective term for all evil beings, human or superhuman. The Scripture representations of the progressive rage of the great adversary, from his first assault on human virtue in Genesis to his final overthrow in Revelation, join with the testimony of Christ just mentioned, to forbid any other conclusion than this, that there is a personal being of great power, who carries on organized opposition to the divine government. Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 299 sq.—“We well say ‘personal devil,’ for there is no devil but personality.” We cannot deny the personality of Satan except upon principles which would compel us to deny the existence of good angels, the personality of the Holy Spirit, and the personality of God the Father,—we may add, even the personality of the human soul. Says Nigel Penruddock in Lord Beaconsfield’s “Endymion”: “Give me a single argument against his [Satan’s] personality, which is not applicable to the personality of the Deity.” One of the most ingenious devices of Satan is that of persuading men that he has no existence. Next to this is the device of substituting for belief in a personal devil the belief in a merely impersonal spirit of evil. Such a substitution we find in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:311—“The idea of the devil was a welcome expedient for the need of advanced religious reflection, to put God out of relation to the evil and badness of the world.” Pfleiderer tells us that the early optimism of the Hebrews, like that of the Greeks, gave place in later times to pessimism and despair. But the Hebrews still had hope of deliverance by the Messiah and an apocalyptic reign of good. For the view that Satan is merely a collective term for all evil beings, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 131-137. Bushnell, holding moral evil to be a necessary “condition privative” of all finite beings as such, believes that “good angels have all been passed through and helped up out of a fall, as the redeemed of mankind will be.” “_Elect angels_” (_1 Tim. 5:21_) then would mean those saved _after_ falling, not those saved _from_ falling; and “_Satan_” would be, not the name of a particular person, but the all or total of all bad minds and powers. _Per contra_, see Smith’s Bible Dictionary, arts.: Angels, Demons, Demoniacs, Satan; Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-26. For a comparison of Satan in the Book of Job, with Milton’s Satan in “Paradise Lost,” and Goethe’s Mephistopheles in “Faust,” see Masson, The Three Devils. We may add to this list Dante’s Satan (or Dis) in the “Divine Comedy,” Byron’s Lucifer in “Cain,” and Mrs. Browning’s Lucifer in her “Drama of Exile”; see Gregory, Christian Ethics, 219. 2. As to their number and organization. (_a_) They are of great multitude.