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

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Their opinion, then, of angels seems to be one of these two: either that they were corporeal substances created upon a special emergency, but not permanent beings; or that they were but images and impressions supernaturally formed in the fancy by the special operation of God, to signify his mind and commands to men, upon which they might fitly be called God’s messengers and ministers. I put in this last into the conjecture, because I find it mentioned by Calvin,159 as the opinion of the Sadducees; but both are noted by Diodate,160 on Acts xxiii. 8, as with equal probability belonging to them. His words are, ‘They did not believe they were subsisting and immortal creatures, but transitory apparitions, or some divine actions and motions to produce some special and notable effect.’

Others also have been lately hammering out the same apprehension concerning angels, and profess themselves delivered from it with great difficulty, differing only in this from some of the heathens before mentioned, that what those ascribed to the puissance of the stars, natural powers, or to weakness of senses and corrupt humours, they, by the advantage of the general notions of Scripture, have ascribed to God, putting forth his power upon the minds and fancies of men, or working by the humours of the body.161 Upon this foundation they will easilier make bold with devils, to deny, if not their being, yet their temptations, imagining that we may possibly do him wrong in fathering upon him these solicitations and provocations to sin, which we by experience find to be working and acting upon our minds, thinking that our own fancies or imaginations may be the only devils that vex us; and this they more readily hearken to, from the nature of dreams and visions which happen to men in an ordinary natural way, where our fancies play with us as if they were distinct from us; as also from this consideration, that the lunatic, epileptic, and frenzical persons are in Scripture called demoniacs, as Mat. xvii. 15, with Luke ix., where the person is called lunatic, and yet said to be taken and vexed by a spirit. So also John x. 20, he hath a devil, and is mad. But these reasonings can do little with an intelligent, considering man, to make him deny what he so really feels, and is so often forewarned of in Scripture; for suppose these were called demoniacs by the vulgar, it doth not compel us to believe they were so. Men are apt to ascribe natural diseases to Satan, and Christ did not concern himself to cure their misapprehensions, while he cured their diseases.162 This some suggest as a reason that may answer many cases, though indeed it cannot answer that of Mat. xvii., because, ver. 18, it is said expressly that ‘Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him,’ which would not have been proper to have been spoken on the account of Christ by the evangelist, to express the cure of a natural disease, for so would he unavoidably have been rendered guilty of the same mistake with the vulgar. But if we should grant that divers mentioned under the name of demoniacs were men disturbed with melancholy, or the falling-sickness, all were not so; for those in Mat. viii. 31, ‘besought Christ, after their ejection,’ to have liberty ‘to go into the herd of swine:’ that if Mr Mede intended to assert that all demoniacs were no other than madmen and lunatics, I question not but he was mistaken, and by his reason, not only must madmen and lunatic persons pass for demoniacs, but all diseases whatsover; for the blind and dumb were called also demoniacs, Mat. ix. 32, and xii. 22.163 But the matter seems to be this, that where men were afflicted with such distempers, Satan took the advantage of them, and acted the possessed accordingly; as he frequently takes the advantage of a melancholy indisposition, and works great terrors and affrightments by it, as in Saul; or at least that, where he possessed, he counterfeited the fits and furies of those natural distempers, and acted some like madmen, and others he made dumb and deaf—which seems to have been the case of those in Mat. ix. and xii., where the deafness and dumbness did depend upon the possession, and was cured with it—others were made to ‘fall on a sudden into fire or water,’ as those that are epileptic, and therefore might such be called both lunatic or epileptic, and also possessed with a devil.