The evil principle of Zoroaster was from eternity self-created and existent, and some of the early Christian sects held the same opinion. The gospel, however, affords no countenance to this notion of a divided sovereignty of the universe. The Divine Teacher, it is true, in discoursing of evil, made use of the language prevalent in His time, and which was adapted to the gross conceptions of His Jewish bearers; but He nowhere presents the embodiment of sin as an antagonism to the absolute power and perfect goodness of God, of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things. Pure himself, He can create nothing impure. Evil, therefore, has no eternity in the past. The fact of its present actual existence is indeed strongly stated; and it is not given us to understand the secret of that divine alchemy whereby pain, and sin, and discord become the means to beneficent ends worthy of the revealed attributes of the Infinite Parent. Unsolved by human reason or philosophy, the dark mystery remains to baffle the generations of men; and only to the eye of humble and childlike faith can it ever be reconciled to the purity, justice, and mercy of Him who is "light, and in whom is no darkness at all." "Do you not believe in the Devil?" some one once asked the Non-conformist Robinson. "I believe in God," was the reply; "don't you?" Henry of Nettesheim says "that it is unanimously maintained that devils do wander up and down in the earth; but what they are, or how they are, ecclesiasticals have not clearly expounded." Origen, in his Platonic speculations on this subject, supposed them to be spirits who, by repentance, might be restored, that in the end all knees might be bowed to the Father of spirits, and He become all in all. Justin Martyr was of the opinion that many of them still hoped for their salvation; and the Cabalists held that this hope of theirs was well founded. One is irresistibly reminded here of the closing verse of the _Address to the Deil_, by Burns:-- "But fare ye weel, Auld Nickie ben! Gin ye wad take a thought and mend, Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken-- Still has a stake I'm was to think upon yon den Fen for your sake." The old schoolmen and fathers seem to agree that the Devil and his ministers have bodies in some sort material, subject to passions and liable to injury and pain. Origen has a curious notion that any evil spirit who, in a contest with a human being, is defeated, loses from thenceforth all his power of mischief, and may be compared to a wasp who has lost his sting.