But what has this spirit of evil to do with “the air”? The Jewish rabbis supposed that the terrestrial atmosphere was Satan’s abode, that it was peopled by demons flitting about invisibly in the encompassing element. But this is a notion foreign to Scripture--certainly not contained in chapter vi. 12--and, in its bare physical sense, without point or relevance to this passage. There follows in immediate apposition to “the domain of the air, _the spirit_ that now works in the sons of disobedience.” Surely, _the air_ here partakes (if it be only here) of the figurative significance of _spirit_ (i.e. _breath_). St Paul refines the Jewish idea of evil spirits dwelling in the surrounding atmosphere into an ethical conception of _the atmosphere of the world_, as that from which the sons of disobedience draw their breath and receive the spirit that inspires them. Here lies, in truth, the dominion of Satan. In other words, Satan constituted the _Zeitgeist_. As Beck profoundly remarks upon this text:[77] “The Power of the air is a fitting designation for the prevailing spirit of the times, whose influence spreads itself like a miasma through the whole atmosphere of the world. It manifests itself as a contagious nature-power; and a _spiritus rector_ works within it, which takes possession of the world of men, alike in individuals and in society, and assumes the direction of it. The form of expression here employed is based on the conception of evil peculiar to Scripture. In Scripture, evil and the principle of evil are not conceived in a purely spiritual way; nor could this be the case in a world of fleshly constitution, where the spiritual has the sensuous for its basis and its vehicle. Spiritual evil exists as a power immanent in cosmical nature.”[78] Concerning great tracts of the earth, and large sections even of Christianized communities, we must still confess with St John: “The world lieth in the Evil One.” The air is impregnated with the infection of sin;[79] its germs float about us constantly, and wherever they find lodgement they set up their deadly fever. Sin is the malarial poison native to our soil; it is an epidemic that runs its course through the entire “age of this world.”