Читать книгу Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations. In Three Parts онлайн

126 страница из 220

Let us cast in another instance to these, and that is, of those that are upon the point of conversion, ready to forsake sin for Christ. Oh, what pains then doth the devil take to keep them back! He visits them every moment with one hindrance or other. Sometimes they are tempted to former pleasures, sometime affrighted with present fears and future disappointments; sometime discouraged with reproaches, scorns, and afflictions that may attend their alteration; otherwhile obstructed by the persuasion or threatening of friends and old acquaintances; but this they are sure of, that they have never more temptations, and those more sensibly troubling, than at that time—a clear evidence that Satan is as diligent as malicious.

I should now go on to display the subtlety of this powerful, malicious, cruel, and diligent adversary. There is but one thing in the way, which hitherto I have taken for granted, and that is, Whether indeed there be any such things as devils and wicked spirits, or that these are but theological engines contrived by persons that carry a goodwill to morality and the public peace, to keep men under an awful fear of such miscarriages as may render them otherwise a shame to themselves and a trouble to others. It must be acknowledged a transgression of the rules of method to offer a proof of that now, which, if at all, ought to have been proved in the beginning of the discourse: and indeed the question at this length, whether there be a devil, hath such affinity with that other, though for the matter they are as different as heaven and hell, whether there be a God, that as it well deserves a confirmation,—for the use that may be made of it to evidence that there is a God, because we feel there is a devil,—so would it require a serious endeavour to perform it substantially. But it would be not only a needless labour to levy an army against professed atheists, who with high scorn and derision roundly deny both God and devils—seeing others have frequently done that—but also it would occasion too large a digression from our present design. I shall therefore only speak a few things to those that own a God, and yet deny such a devil as we have described: and yet not to all of these neither, for there were many heathens who were confident assertors of a deity, that nevertheless denied the being of spirits as severed from corporeity; and others were so far from the acknowledgment of devils, that they confounded them in the number of their gods. Others there were who gave such credit to the frequent relations of apparitions and disturbances of that kind, that many had attested and complained of, that they expressed more ingenuity154 than Lucian, who pertinaciously refused to believe, because he never saw them; and yet though they believed something of reality in that that was the affrightment and trouble of others, they nevertheless ascribed such extraordinary things to natural causes, some to the powers of the heavens and stars in their influences upon natural bodies, or by the mediation of certain herbs, stones, minerals, creatures, voices, and characters, under a special observation of the motion of the planets.155 Some refer such things to the subtlety and quickness of the senses of hearing and seeing, which might create forms and images of things, or discover I know not what reflections from the sun and moon. Some [Pomponatius, Epicureans] fancy the shapes and visions to be exuviæ, thin scales or skins of natural things, giving representations of the bodies that cast them off, or exhalations from sepulchres, representing the shape of the body. Others [Cardan, Academics] make them the effects of our untrusty and deceitful senses, the debility and corruption whereof they conclude to be such, and so general, that most men are in hazard to be imposed upon by delusive appearances. But with far greater show of likelihood do some [Averrhoes] make all such things to be nothing else but the issues of melancholy and corrupt humours, which makes men believe they hear, see, and suffer strange things, when there is nothing near them; or really to undergo strange fits, as in lunacy and epilepsy.156 Leaving these men as not capable of information from Scripture evidence, because disowning it, let us inquire what mistaken apprehensions there have been in this matter among those that have pretended a reverence to and belief of Scripture. The Sadducees deserve the first place, because they are by name noted in Scripture to have ‘denied the resurrection,’ and to have ‘affirmed that there is neither angel nor spirit,’ Acts xxiii. 8, and Mat. xxii. 23.