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

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This opinion of theirs, could we certainly find it out, would make much for the confirmation of the truth in question, seeing, whatever it was, it is positively condemned in Scripture, and the contrary asserted to be true. Many, and that upon considerable grounds, do think that they do not deny absolutely that there were any angels at all, but that, acknowledging that something there was which was called an angel, yet they imagining it to be far otherwise than what it is indeed, were accused justly for denying such a kind of angels as the Scripture had everywhere asserted and described. For considering that they owned a God, and, at least, the five books of Moses, if not all the other books of the Old Testament—as Scaliger and others judge, not without great probability, for neither doth the Scripture—nor Josephus mention any such thing of the prophets—it is unimaginable that they would altogether deny that there was angel or spirit at all.157 They read of angels appearing to Lot, to Abraham, and met with it so frequently, that, believing Scriptures to be true, they could not believe angels to be an absolute fiction; for one fable or falsity in Scripture, which so highly asserts itself to be an unerring oracle of the true God, must of necessity have destroyed the credit of all, and rendered them as justly suspected to be true in nothing, when apparently false or fabulous in anything.