March 22, 1857
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.”—1 Peter v. 8, 9.
I have heard divines say that it is very hard to convince men of the existence of a devil, that they scarcely know whether they are convinced of it themselves. I think they are mistaken. I believe they may give their people credit for having that belief, whatever other they have not. I am satisfied that they themselves acknowledge a devil. I wish I were as sure that we or that you were always believing in God.
The name, we all know, is never long absent from human discourse. It is used in jest by those who do not use it in earnest. That is one sign. An opinion, a fear, a fancy,—call it what you will,—must have prevailed long, must have taken possession of men’s minds, before it could find its way so readily to their lips. Are there no other signs? Does not each man complain of some burden, some incubus which he wants to throw off? One may find it outside of him; if he could have better or less stupid beings to work with, all would be well. Another feels as if it were altogether within him. He finds the enemy in his chamber; he carries the enemy about with him in his heart. It is a miserable solitary strife, of which no one knows anything, in which no one has any interest but himself. Standing at these two opposite poles, these men are nevertheless at one, as to the fact of there being that which acts upon them just as some subtle invader or tyrant, whom they could behold in an outward shape, would do. Christians and atheists may often agree that the language of Scripture is unsuitable to our times. But they agree also in this, that they fall into it unawares when they seek to describe what they are feeling and suffering. Intelligent travellers and zealous missionaries know that in barbarous countries the difficulty is not to convince men of this doctrine, but of any other.
Perhaps this reflection may relieve our minds of a very painful suspicion. Scholars often affirm, with an air of great confidence, that our Lord was only conforming Himself to a Jewish habit and tradition when He spoke of evil spirits, and attributed to them the plagues from which men are suffering. Considering how large a portion of His acts and words express or imply this doctrine, no one who believes that He is the Truth, and that He was born into the world to bear witness of the Truth, can accept this statement as it is ordinarily propounded. But we may admit it to this extent. We may acknowledge that our Lord’s words were none of them directed to prove the existence of evil spirits. He found their existence acknowledged. Sickness, Pain, Death, were the demonstrations to the hearts of men of their presence. The conscience of wrong committed mixed with the experience of suffering to invest them with a very awful dominion. The belief of a One Evil Spirit was far less distinct and popular. It was a natural, almost necessary generalisation of the intellect to the cold speculator; it was a dark vision to the actual fighter, one which lay far in the background while he had strength to work and to pray, but which in hours of bodily and mental feebleness might become overwhelming.
What has been said of Christ’s words is true also of His acts. He Who encountered sickness, madness, death, was certainly not setting forth the power of evil spirits. He was proving their weakness. He was, say the Evangelists, “casting them out.” That is their language; and I believe it is true and honest language. It is disagreeable to refined men, to those who wish to be different from their kind, and therefore it was the most fitting for the Son of Man, Who came to us as members of a kind, Who came to break down the barriers which separate us as members of a kind. Suffering isolates us from each other. My sickness, if it is ever so like yours, is yet felt by me as if it were entirely my own, as if it had nothing to do with yours. Even epidemic complaints—those which by their name and all their incidents testify of our common nature—are yet just as special, as individualizing, as those which are most peculiar. Only if One appeared, Who sympathized with all suffering as if it were His own, and yet treated it as entirely alien from the body and soul which it had taken—as an unlawful invader and intruder,—could this isolation be overcome. Such a Deliverer as the Gospel declares our Lord to be, could not set at nought the old doctrine, that Evil had marred a creation which was perfectly good, and that that evil was not natural, but voluntary; He must endorse that opinion; He must give it a form and a definiteness which it had not before. What had been an anticipation of the human reason becomes a reality—a reality which for the first time it can dare to face.
Still more certain was it that, if a Son of God could not contradict the witness in the heart of man, that Evil, however multiform, however broken up into different shapes, however opposed to all unity, yet exists completely and essentially in some Will,—which must be spoken of as the Accuser, the Tempter, the Adversary—the revelation of a Father was the revelation of a Will that is opposite to this. Evil and good are so mixed in this world of ours, that it is a most natural thing for us to suppose them mixed by an eternal law. So soon as we begin to confess a Being of perfect goodness, that thought becomes blasphemous and incredible. There is still the refuge of supposing Goodness to be something abstract and impersonal; a blessing to be attained by fortunate seekers, not a Power which is drawing creatures towards itself. When this vision dawns upon us, we may suspect for awhile that each of us in his own dark and solitary self is the source of the evil which is threatening to overwhelm us. It may be well to rest for a moment in that conclusion, for as long as will enable us to realize the truth that it is our self-will which resists the loving Will of God, that this is the hindrance to His purpose of blessing us. But since we cannot shut ourselves up in the contemplation of our own sin without sinking into despair and the deepest sin; since the sin of other men, the sin of the world, must be that very sin which is crushing me, the thought of a Self-Will which is acting upon us all, which is drawing all away from the true Will, grows, I believe, with the growth, and strengthens with the strength of that conviction which the preaching, the life, the death of Jesus Christ imparts to us. Take away that conviction; say that we are Fatherless creatures, or that we have no Elder Brother in Whom all the nature of the Father is manifested, and in Whom men are united to Him; and I admit at once that the feeling of a common foe, whom each separately and all together have to watch against, if it cannot be shaken off altogether, becomes utterly hazy and vague. At all events, this may be set down as a fact which every one may ascertain for himself, by comparing the Old and New Testament. The language of the latter on the subject of the Devil cannot be resolved into a vague tradition from the former, which a higher wisdom could not wholly dispense with and discard. It is so immeasurably more broad, distinct, and personal than anything in the earlier record, that if breadth, distinctness, personality, are signs and proofs of superstition, the Jew and his law may be nearly acquitted of a superstition which the Gospels must have the credit of establishing, almost introducing.
I have alluded specially to the records of our Lord’s life upon earth. When the Apostles went forth to preach of His resurrection, they too had no occasion to persuade men of the existence of evil powers. That was assumed; the Jews and Gentiles were agreed so far. Their theories were different; the witness which the facts of this world and of their own experience bore to their consciences was essentially the same.
Can there be a deliverer from these evil powers? that was the only question which it was important to get answered. The Apostles went into all lands to proclaim that there was such a Deliverer. They affirmed that the Son of God was the Author and Upholder of the true Order of the world, and that He had come to fight against its disorders. They said that He had overcome the diseases of men here upon earth; that by death He had overcome Death; that He was every hour overcoming some principality and power in high places, which was claiming men as subjects and captives. This was their Gospel. Having such a one, they spoke of necessity concerning these principalities and powers. They did not begin with saying, “You have no such adversaries; it has been a mere fancy and delusion of men in all parts of the universe to suppose that they have.” If you asked me how this worked—whether it did not ratify and increase the dread which Jew and Heathen felt already of dark places that might be haunted or possessed by these evil spirits; whether it must not have increased enormously their disposition to conjure up visible shapes, and impute to them monstrous principles and designs? I should answer, I believe that if any language could teach men that they were never to dread dark places on the earth because they had continually to dread the dark places in themselves, that nothing material should be accounted mischievous or accursed because evil is spiritual and voluntary, this was the language. Imagine the Ephesians after they had seen St. Paul in peril from Demetrius the maker of shrines for Diana, in peril from the conspiracies of his countrymen the abjurers of all goddesses—when they knew that he had been stoned at Iconium, hardly rescued from a mob at Jerusalem, imprisoned by the Emperor at Rome—imagine them reading a letter of his containing the words, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.” He, of all men, to say that! And yet he said it in solemn, sober earnest. These flesh and blood men were not his enemies; either because they had flesh and blood, or because they were men with spiritual capacities and energies. On both grounds he claimed fellowship with them, both were signs of their relation to the Son of Man. But it was the spiritual wickedness which had enslaved their spirits, which had separated them from their true Lord, to which they were rendering an unlawful and base homage, it was this which cried out in them, “What have we to do with thee, preacher of a Son of God? He is come to torment us and to make our victims impatient of our yoke. His voice must be stifled or ours will be stifled.” These principalities and powers were actually all that he feared. All else was to be reverenced, to be loved. The earth was redeemed. He held it a lie to say that any portion of creation was not God’s. Man had been redeemed. It was a lie to say that Christ was not the Head of every man. The whole realm of nature and humanity had been conquered for the righteous King. But was not St. Paul tempted just as much as Demetrius to doubt and deny this redemption, to believe himself sold to evil, to believe that he must succumb to it as his necessary and appointed lot? Did this temptation mean nothing? To say so, was to say that the crimes and corruptions which were destroying the souls and bodies of men meant nothing. Or were these temptations only echoes of his own bad thoughts and fancies, or the suggestions of other men? To say so was to solve the problem in a way that could satisfy no resolute thinker, still less any resolute doer. St. Paul spent his life in fighting with these enemies; if that fight was not real, his life was not real. Those who did not fight could describe the battle as they liked; to him it was one with principalities and powers; he could give it no other name which would not have been a falser, because a feebler one.
Temptations so diverse and contradictory as those to which he was exposed himself, and which he saw besetting the various Churches he had founded, must be denoted by those phrases; to have rejected them would have been to misrepresent the most perplexing and yet the most serious passages of his own, and of human experience. Why is it that no invitation to evil takes exactly the form to-day which it took yesterday? Why is it that any temptation of to-day may be exactly to the opposite evil from that which allured one yesterday? Why is it that no one can measure the effect of any word that is spoken or object that is presented to another, by its effect upon himself; that an argument which falls dead upon one may fill another with endless doubts; that one may be urged to the direst crimes by motives of which his next neighbour is scarcely conscious? Is it not right to speak of principalities and powers? Such language may seem unnecessary and inconvenient to those who are formalizing human life: to those who are in the agony of life, it is indispensable.
But the Apostles, like their Master, used the singular number as well as the plural. They too were obliged to speak of an Adversary, of a Tempter. They were forced, I say, to do this; because they were bringing a message concerning one absolutely good God, Who was manifested in one perfect Image, Who was baptizing men into one Spirit; because they were bringing this message to all different races of men, who had split the Divine Being into a thousand different portions, who had confounded Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. The moment the complete unity of the Divine Nature was proclaimed,—the unity of the Father with the Son in one Spirit; the moment that men had been baptized into this perfect, loving, all-embracing Name, they must be told, “There is an adversary of this Name, a self-seeking, self-concentrated, self-worshipping adversary, who is seeking to draw you out of communion with it, and therefore out of communion with each other. You must be sober, for he seeks to make you drunk with the pleasures of this life, with your own self-conceit, that you may lose all thoughts of your Father’s house. You must be vigilant, for he seeks to stupefy you with opiates, to keep you asleep.” The language in which this adversary is described must be simple, coarse—if you like to call it so. There must be no idle generalizations which might make the reader think the danger not substantial. Men who knew something of the distant howl of wild beasts; who knew the hunger of which it was the sign; who had heard, if they had not seen, the actual creature start from some thicket, when the watch-fires were low and most of the caravan were asleep,—they were told that even so was this adversary giving a low note of his approach, which, if it was not heeded, would be followed by a spring; and that the claws would not play with their victim, but tear him; that the purpose was not to hurt, but to devour.
St. Peter felt that a picture as living as this was necessary, that his next words might not be idle words: “Whom resist steadfast in the faith.” Once believe that you have an adversary—that the conflict is not a sham one, and you can repulse him. You have not to win a position, but defend one. You belong to God. You can tell the adversary that you owe him no allegiance; that you scorn his promises and his threats; that it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you His Kingdom of Heaven, and that you do not choose to exchange it for the Kingdom of Hell. But this command and exhortation would, I suspect, have been quite useless, if they had not been sustained by the recollection which follows: “Knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren which are in the world.” The members of the Christian Church were very likely to take up the notion that they and the world around them were under quite different laws; that they were not subject to the passions which other men were subject to; that they were out of the range of the influence of the Evil Spirit. A more plausible delusion, or a more perilous one, cannot be imagined. An Apostle had no higher duty than to shatter it by every testimony drawn from his hardly-won experience, as well as from the falls of his predecessors and contemporaries. He was to assure his disciples that the privilege of their brotherhood in Christ exempted them from no assault which threatened those who had not asserted that privilege. The same—precisely the same motives and arguments to evil were about them as about Heathens and Pharisees; the ones were not in themselves the least stronger than the others. The brotherhood were to know the nature of their enemies, and to know their own feebleness;—that was their first advantage. Men who did not think that Christ had taken their nature, and had been tempted as they were, met the evil in some of its complicated appearances. They encountered it in its first root. The world might fancy it could vanquish obvious evils by some tricks of fence, or could subdue evil with its own weapons. The member of Christ’s brotherhood was to understand the force of the paradox—
“Sola salus illi nullam sperare salutem.”
His hope lay in his despair; he could overcome, because he was obliged, from the impossibility of saving himself, to stand still and see the salvation of God. And this advantage too he had, that being one of a Society, of a Brotherhood, he felt that his enemy was the enemy of his brethren, and the enemy of that world which he wished to claim as part of his family. He was fighting for all men when he was fighting for himself. The flesh might contradict the spirit in him; the world might strive to draw him into its vortex. But in regarding the devil as the adversary from whom the flesh and the world derived all their malignity, he could not be a champion for himself without being a champion for all men, however they might hate him, however they might try to seduce him.
What I said, then, at the beginning of my sermon, I repeat now. No one need be told to believe in a devil, for he does it, whether he confesses it or not. But every one should be told and urged to believe in God, and to trust to Him as a living, personal Deliverer and Helper; then he will know what enemy he has to be delivered from and to be helped against. Every one should be told that he has a Father in Heaven, whose name he is to hallow; and then he will discover that there is a father of all the evil deeds he has ever thought, the father of all that is dark, superstitious, foul, in the universe; the father whose name he must hate, that he may love God with all his heart and his neighbour as himself.
I said that in the Gospel physical evils, as well as moral, were traced to this source. I know how great a dread good people, perhaps the best people, have of adopting this language in this age. They appeal to the doctrine so beautifully set forth in our service for the Visitation of the Sick, that Almighty God is the God of life and death, and of all things to them pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness, and sickness. They ask whether, if we believe this, we can say that weakness or sickness has in any sense its origin in an evil spirit. I avow that I do stedfastly believe this assertion; that I think the Evangelists believed it much more stedfastly than I do; that I think the writers of the Visitation Service learnt it of them. The life of Christ, and the death of Christ, are the grounds upon which this confidence and comfortable assertion rest. And yet the Evangelists and Apostles, with the fullest confidence respecting this life and death, and all that was implied in them, did speak of the devil as holding a palsied woman bound for eighteen years, did speak of Christ as delivering men from plagues and evil spirits. I hold therefore that these two statements are consistent; that we are bound to suppose that Almighty God has turned physical diseases into an instrument for the discipline and cure of moral diseases, and that those to whom they are sent are to use them as if they were sent for that end, and to be sure that they are in the hands of a merciful Father; that we who are free from them are to honour sick people as those who are suffering for our good, and for the removal of our evils; and yet that we are most distinctly and solemnly to aver, that health as such is divine, and according to God’s order; that disease as such is of the devil, and contrary to God’s order. Which opinion, so far from being superstitious, is the great remedy against that most mischievous superstition which looks upon plagues and sicknesses with a kind of tenderness, as if, because they are God’s visitations, it is not His will that we should fight against them with all the resources of science and human art; which permits all the causes that nourish disease to increase, as if the good God did not regard them as His foes, and would not enable us to put them down, supposing we have really faith in His wisdom and power.
But I care much more that we should not shrink—through any shame of an old and vulgar opinion—from the acknowledgment that there is an adversary of Righteousness and Unity, who is plotting against us all. I fear greatly that unless we are on our watch against such an adversary, we shall not look upon God as altogether good; we shall unawares invest Him with some dark qualities, or we shall not feel that He is a Person in Whom we may trust, a refuge to Whom we may always resort. I fear that there will be mixed with our notions of the serving Him a number of petty quibbles and qualms of conscience, because we do not set before our minds the great alternative of worshipping Him, or of worshipping in our inmost hearts that which is directly the opposite of Him. I fear that we shall look upon Sloth, Cowardice, Insincerity, not as hideous monsters from which we are to cry that we may be saved, but only as unhappy conditions of mind which we may safely tolerate. I fear that we shall accuse each other of faction and party spirit, and delight to fix these charges on opponents; never suspecting that the same fiend is at work upon us all, to fill us with the same low and venomous tempers, and to make our country the sufferer by them. I fear that our young men will cry out that they see no longer any great distinction between one political or religious school and another, though each retains its spite against the other, and therefore that the safest course is to be equally indifferent and contemptuous to all. I fear they will say that they can as little choose between men as between principles; that one is to be trusted as little as another; that each man must do that which is right in his own eyes. Oh! surely there is another moral to be drawn from what is passing around us and within us. Party distinctions are disappearing, that the eternal distinction between Right and Wrong, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil, may be fully manifested. We have been doing that which is right in our own eyes; we have been choosing leaders according to our own tastes and fancies. We can do it no longer. We are to elect henceforth between higher chiefs. We must commit ourselves to the spirit of Self-Will, to be drawn by him into what pits of darkness he pleases; or to the Spirit which dwelt in the Son of God, to be made His faithful and obedient servants. It is not a question about this special occupation or that. In politics, in trade, in what we call our religious services, we may, we must, yield ourselves to the Spirit of Truth or to the Spirit of Lies. The Kingdom of Hell is not far off, it is about us. Each one of us at each moment may be doing the work and earning the wages of its ruler. The Kingdom of Heaven is not far off, it is about us. Let us repent and turn to the King of it, for when all temporary guides fail, He is saying to us, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me. I will guide you by My counsel here. I will receive you to My glory hereafter.”