March 22, 1857
The passage: Be sober and alert, because your adversary the devil prowls like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, knowing that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same sufferings.
I have heard preachers say it is hard to convince men of a devil’s existence — that people scarcely know if they believe it themselves. I think this is wrong. People already believe in a devil, whatever else they lack faith in. I wish I were as sure that we always believed in God.
The name of the devil is never long absent from human speech, used in jest even by those who don’t mean it seriously — itself a sign that the idea has long held minds before reaching lips so easily. Other signs: everyone complains of some burden he wants off him. One finds it outside himself — if only he had better people to work with. Another feels it wholly within, an enemy in his own heart, a solitary struggle no one else shares. Opposite as these are, both agree that something acts on them like an outward invader or tyrant would. Christians and atheists may agree that Scripture’s language on this is unsuited to our times, yet both fall into that very language unawares when describing what they suffer. Missionaries and travellers find that in barbarous countries the difficulty is never to convince men of this doctrine, but of any other.
This may relieve us of a painful suspicion. Scholars often say confidently that our Lord only conformed to Jewish tradition when he spoke of evil spirits causing men’s plagues. Given how much of his acts and words express this, no one who believes he is the Truth can accept that claim as usually put. But we may grant this much: none of his words aimed to prove evil spirits exist — he found that already acknowledged. Sickness, pain, and death were what demonstrated their presence to men’s hearts; conscience of wrongdoing mixed with suffering to give them a dread dominion. Belief in one single Evil Spirit was less distinct and popular — a natural generalization to the cold thinker, a dark vision to the actual fighter, lying in the background while he had strength to work and pray, but able to overwhelm him in hours of weakness.
The same is true of his acts. He who met sickness, madness, and death was not displaying the power of evil spirits but their weakness — the Evangelists say he was “casting them out,” honest language, disagreeable to refined men but fitting for the Son of Man who broke down the barriers separating us as one kind. Suffering isolates: my sickness, however like yours, feels wholly my own; even epidemics, which testify to our common nature, feel as individual as any other. Only if One appeared who sympathized with all suffering as his own, yet treated it as an alien intruder in the body and soul it possessed, could this isolation be overcome. Such a Deliverer could not set aside the old doctrine that evil had marred a creation that was perfectly good, and that this evil was voluntary, not natural; he had to endorse it and give it a definiteness it lacked before — turning an anticipation of human reason into a reality that could for the first time be faced.
Still more certain: if a Son of God could not contradict the heart’s witness that Evil, however many its shapes, exists essentially in some Will — to be called the Accuser, the Tempter, the Adversary — then the revelation of a Father was the revelation of a Will opposed to this. Good and evil are so mixed in our world that it’s natural to suppose them mixed by an eternal law; but once we confess a Being of perfect goodness, that thought becomes blasphemous. There remains the refuge of an abstract, impersonal Goodness, not a Power drawing creatures to itself. When the true vision dawns, we may suspect for a while that each of us is the source of the evil threatening him — and it is well to rest there long enough to realize that it is our self-will resisting God’s loving Will. But we cannot shut ourselves up in contemplating our own sin without sinking into despair and deeper sin; since the sin of others, the sin of the world, is the very sin crushing me, the thought of a Self-Will acting on us all grows with the conviction that the preaching, life, and death of Christ gives us. Remove that conviction — say we are fatherless, with no Elder Brother — and the feeling of a common foe becomes utterly vague. Compare the Old and New Testaments and you will find this: the New Testament’s language about the Devil cannot be resolved into a vague inheritance from the Old which a higher wisdom simply failed to shed. It is so much broader, more distinct, more personal that if such qualities mark superstition, the Jew and his law are nearly acquitted of a superstition the Gospels must be credited with establishing, almost introducing.
I’ve spoken of Christ’s earthly life. When the Apostles preached his resurrection, they too had no need to persuade men that evil powers existed — that was assumed; Jew and Gentile agreed on this, though their theories differed, because the facts of the world and of their own experience bore essentially the same witness to their consciences.
The only important question was: can there be a deliverer from these evil powers? The Apostles proclaimed that there was — that the Son of God was Author and Upholder of the true order of the world, come to fight its disorders; that he had overcome diseases here on earth, overcome Death by death, and was every hour overcoming some principality and power claiming men as captives. This was their Gospel, and having it, they spoke necessarily of these principalities and powers; they did not begin by telling people their dread of such adversaries was mere fancy. Did this increase the existing dread of haunted places, the disposition to conjure up visible shapes of evil? I believe that if any language could teach men to dread not outward dark places but the dark places within themselves — that nothing material is accursed, since evil is spiritual and voluntary — it was this language. Imagine the Ephesians, who had seen Paul endangered by Demetrius the shrine-maker, by conspiracies of his own countrymen, who knew he had been stoned at Iconium, nearly killed by a mob at Jerusalem, imprisoned at Rome — imagine them reading his words, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.” He, of all men, to say that! Yet he said it in sober earnest. These flesh-and-blood men were not his enemies, whether as flesh and blood or as men with spiritual capacities — both were signs of their kinship with the Son of Man. It was the spiritual wickedness enslaving their spirits, receiving their unlawful homage, that cried in them, “What have we to do with you, preacher of a Son of God? He will make our victims restless under our yoke; his voice must be stifled or ours will be.” These principalities and powers were all that Paul actually feared; everything else was to be loved and reverenced. The earth was redeemed — no part of creation was not God’s; man was redeemed, Christ the Head of every man; the whole realm of nature and humanity conquered for the righteous King. But was not Paul tempted, exactly as Demetrius was, to doubt this redemption, to believe himself sold to evil as his necessary lot? Did that temptation mean nothing? To say so is to say that the crimes destroying men’s souls and bodies mean nothing. Or were his temptations mere echoes of his own bad thoughts or others’ suggestions? That answer satisfies no resolute thinker or doer. Paul spent his life fighting these enemies; if the fight was not real, his life was not real. Those who never fought might call the battle what they liked; to him it was one with principalities and powers, and no other name would have been less false, only feebler.
Temptations as diverse and contradictory as those Paul faced himself, and saw besetting the churches he founded, had to be named this way; to reject the language would misrepresent the most perplexing and serious passages of human experience. Why does no day’s temptation take exactly yesterday’s form? Why may today’s temptation be the very opposite evil from yesterday’s? Why can no one measure a word’s effect on another by its effect on himself — an argument that falls dead on one fills another with endless doubts, one man is driven to crimes by motives his neighbor barely feels? Is it not right, then, to speak of principalities and powers? Such language may seem unnecessary to those who formalize life; to those in its agony, it is indispensable.
But the Apostles, like their Master, used the singular as well as the plural — forced to speak of an Adversary, a Tempter, because they brought a message of one absolutely good God, manifest in one Image, baptizing men into one Spirit, to races who had split the Divine Being into a thousand portions and confounded good and evil. The moment this complete unity was proclaimed — Father with Son in one Spirit — and men baptized into this loving, all-embracing Name, they had to be told: there is an adversary of this Name, self-seeking and self-worshipping, trying to draw you out of communion with it and with each other. Be sober, for he seeks to make you drunk with pleasure and self-conceit, so you forget your Father’s house. Be vigilant, for he seeks to stupefy you into sleep. The language describing him had to be simple, even coarse — no vague generalizations that might make the danger seem unreal. Men who knew the distant howl of wild beasts, the hunger it signaled, who had heard the creature start from a thicket when the watch-fires burned low and the caravan slept, were told that this adversary too gives a low warning note before he springs — that his claws do not play with the victim but tear him, for his purpose is not to hurt but to devour.
Peter felt such a vivid picture was necessary so his next words would not be empty: “Whom resist steadfast in the faith.” Once you believe you have an adversary — that the conflict is no sham — you can repulse him. You are not winning a position but defending one you already hold; you belong to God, and can tell the adversary you owe him nothing, that you scorn his promises and threats, and will not trade your Father’s Kingdom of Heaven for his Kingdom of Hell. But this command would be useless without what follows: “knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.” Christians were prone to think themselves under different laws than others, exempt from the passions and the Evil Spirit’s influence that governed other men — a plausible and perilous delusion. The Apostle’s duty was to shatter it, by his own hard-won experience and by the falls of others before and around him: the privilege of brotherhood in Christ exempted no one from the very assault that threatened those without it. Precisely the same motives to evil surrounded Heathen and Pharisee alike, no weaker for either. The brotherhood’s first advantage was simply to know their enemy’s nature and their own weakness. Those who didn’t believe Christ had taken their nature and been tempted as they were met evil only in its complicated outward forms; the Christian met it at its root. The world thought it could vanquish evils by clever tricks or beat evil with evil’s own weapons. The member of Christ’s brotherhood had to grasp the paradox: his only safety lay in hoping for no safety of his own — his hope lay in his despair, since being unable to save himself, he was forced to stand still and see the salvation of God. And he had this further advantage: as one of a Brotherhood, he felt his enemy was the enemy of his brethren and of the world he wished to claim as family, so that fighting for himself was fighting for all men. The flesh might contradict his spirit, the world draw him into its vortex — but seeing the devil as the source of both flesh’s and world’s malignity, he could not be a champion for himself without being a champion for all men, however they hated or tried to seduce him.
What I said at the start, I repeat: no one need be told to believe in a devil, for he does so whether he admits it or not. But everyone should be told to believe in God, to trust him as a living, personal Deliverer and Helper — then he will know what enemy he needs deliverance from. Everyone should be told he has a Father in Heaven whose name he is to hallow; then he will discover there is a father of all the evil he has ever thought, the father of all that is dark, superstitious, and foul in the universe, whose name he must hate in order to love God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself.
I said physical evils as well as moral are traced in the Gospel to this source. I know how greatly good people dread this language today. They appeal to the Visitation of the Sick service, which says Almighty God is the God of life and death and all pertaining to them — youth, strength, health, age, weakness, sickness — and ask whether, believing this, we can say sickness has any origin in an evil spirit. I steadfastly believe this assertion of the service — and believe the Evangelists held it more steadfastly than I do, and that the writers of the service learned it from them. The life and death of Christ are the ground of this confidence. Yet the Evangelists and Apostles, with full confidence in that life and death, still spoke of the devil holding a palsied woman bound eighteen years, spoke of Christ delivering men from plagues and evil spirits. I hold these consistent: Almighty God has turned physical disease into an instrument for curing moral disease, and those afflicted should use it so, trusting they are in a merciful Father’s hands; those free from it should honour the sick as suffering for our good. Yet we must still say plainly that health as such is divine and according to God’s order, and disease as such is of the devil and contrary to that order. Far from being superstitious, this is the great remedy against the truly mischievous superstition that regards plagues with a tenderness suggesting we should not fight them with all the resources of science and art — a superstition that lets the causes of disease multiply, as if God did not count them his foes and enable us, if we truly trusted his wisdom and power, to put them down.
But I care much more that we not shrink, from shame of an old and vulgar opinion, from acknowledging an adversary of Righteousness and Unity plotting against us all. Unless we watch against him, I fear we will not see God as wholly good — we will unawares invest him with dark qualities, and fail to feel him a Person we may trust and a refuge we may resort to. I fear our service of him will be mixed with petty scruples, because we do not see the great alternative: worshipping him, or worshipping in our hearts his direct opposite. I fear we will look on Sloth, Cowardice, and Insincerity not as hideous things to cry out for deliverance from, but as conditions we may safely tolerate. I fear we will accuse each other of faction, delighting to fix the charge on opponents, never suspecting the same fiend fills us all with the same low, venomous tempers, to our country’s cost. I fear our young men will say they see no real distinction left between political or religious schools, though each retains its spite against the other, and conclude the safest course is contempt for all alike; that they can no more choose between men than between principles, and that each must do what is right in his own eyes. But surely another lesson is to be drawn: party distinctions are disappearing so that the eternal distinction between Right and Wrong, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil, may be fully seen. We have been doing what was right in our own eyes, choosing leaders by taste and fancy; we can do so no longer. We must now choose between higher chiefs — commit ourselves to the Spirit of Self-Will, to be drawn into whatever pits of darkness he pleases, or to the Spirit that dwelt in the Son of God, to become his faithful servants. This is not a question about this occupation or that: in politics, trade, or worship, we must yield to the Spirit of Truth or the Spirit of Lies. The Kingdom of Hell is not far off; it is about us, and each of us at each moment may be doing its ruler’s work and earning his wages. The Kingdom of Heaven is not far off either; it is about us. Let us repent and turn to its King, who says to us, when all other guides fail, “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; I will guide you by my counsel here, and receive you to my glory hereafter.”