possession of man’s homage, all serve the purpose of those behind the scenes, are puppets under their command, and have a common end and result in the captivity of their victim. More even than this; while they seem disunited and contradictory, they are really one, marshalled by the power, directed by the mind, held in the hand of him who is called “the ruler of this world,” “the power of darkness,” “the might of the enemy,” who “holds the power of death,” “the ancient serpent, who leads into error the whole world,” “that malignant one in whom the whole world is lying,” “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the children of disobedience,” who musters “the principalities, the powers, the world-rulers of this life’s darkness, the spirits of wickedness in ethereal places,” to serve him in his conflict with man’s flesh and blood; in fine, for S. Paul’s language goes one point even beyond that of his Master, and terms him not merely the ruler, but “the God of this world;”(28) that is to say, this manifold idolatry is the establishment of his kingdom, the enthronement of his godhead over men, the mark of their captivity and prostration before him. The statements of our Lord and his apostles being so express and definite as to the existence of this diabolic kingdom, and as to the personal sway of a sovereign over it, let us look once more at this idolatry itself by the light thus shed upon it. And first, whether we regard men as made to be members of a well-ordered society, enjoying temporal prosperity in this life, or as further intended for happiness in a future life, resulting from their present actions,(29) the condition in which the heathen nations are actually found at our Lord’s coming is quite unintelligible unless we suppose the reality of a diabolic power exercised upon them. The polytheism which we have witnessed holding all human life in its grasp, while it did not teach and uphold the great laws of morality, did, on the other hand, actively inculcate the violation of those laws by continually representing to the minds and eyes of men such a violation in the acts of the deities worshipped. It was a perpetual incitement of men to crimes, as well against social order as against all the sanctities of private life; it fostered the savageness of slavery, and the utmost cruelty in carrying on war, because its deities, being diverse for every nation, and belonging exclusively to the nation, had obliterated the idea that all men were of one blood, and thus delivered over the captive and the slave to the pitiless hatred or equally pitiless luxury of their fellow-men. So much for its action on human society as terminating with this life, while for a life to come it had no doctrine and made no preparation, but had suffered the earlier teaching of a future retribution to be considered as a fable fit for children and old women. Looking at such a condition of human society from the moral point