p. 392 | AN EXTINCT CREATURE

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 3, 1867

"AN EXTINCT CREATURE."

There is nothing that more effectually proves the existence of the Devil than his efforts to persuade men that he does not exist. In no way could he render the field of his operations so smooth, and the accomplishment of his purposes so easy, as to establish mankind thoroughly in the belief that they had no such foe, against whom they must watch, and whose approach they must resist. Hence his unceasing efforts to this end. And he is meeting with marvelous success. Millions are already deceived into this fatal delusion. Men of ability and papers of reputation and influence, openly advocate it. We are reminded of this by last week's N. Y. Tribune, which contains an article opened in the following Devil-gratifying strain:

"A few years ago, M. Du Chaillu treated this torpid, blasé nineteenth-century society of ours to a new sensation. He discovered the Gorilla. This beast, as he described it, was one of the most dreadful monsters ever let loose upon a miserable world. The old horned Devil of our grandfathers that now happily, or unhappily, as the reader may think best, is decided to be an extinct creature, was a mere tame, purring, pussy-cat, compared with this inhabitant of the African jungle. The new comer, if we were to believe M. Du Chaillu, had all the deformities and hideous traits of our old friend Satan, with enough additional ingenious, ugly features, both of mind and person, to set up fifty new Tract Societies, each with a peculiar style of fiend warranted to have no resemblance to the fiend of any other establishment."

With pleasure we turn from the utterances of such a writer, who seems to consider himself specially called to make a mock of divine things, to an article which appeared in the Independent of the same week, from J. P. Gulliver, of Chicago, on Fighting the Devil, and which we commend to the careful perusal of all, especially to believers in present truth, against whom the Devil, in these last days of his wrathful efforts, will make his most specious attacks:

"We hesitate not to aver that belief in a personal Devil—a veritable ‘lion, going about roaring and seeking whom he may devour’—is a prime element in all genuine spiritual manliness. Paul had it when he declared that he was wrestling with these ‘spirits in high places.’ Luther had it when he saw the giant form of Satan, in a bodily shape, prowling about him in the Castle of Wartburg; and his performance with the inkstand, though slightly ridiculous, is not a bad example of the kind of treatment recommended by James in the familiar verse, ‘Resist the Devil and he will flee from you.’ Indeed, there is no escaping, on hermeneutical grounds, from the intense personality which the Greek article gives to Satan in the New Testament. The Devil—Ho Diabolos—looks out upon us, through the Scripture phraseology, as veritable a reality as a lion behind the bars of his cage. The Devil of the Bible is not merely a devil; still less is it an abstract principle of evil; least of all, is it a mere popular superstition, introduced historically or scenically, like a dragon in a tragedy, to give spice to the narrative at the expense of its truthfulness.

"The intelligence who appears in the scenes of Christ's temptation; who led out Judas to the betrayal; whose ‘snares,’ ‘works,’ and ‘children,’ we are to avoid; who fought with Michael, and who is expressly defined as being ‘that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,’ must be a veritable person. The man who wrings all personality out of such language, simply tortures it by his exegesis, instead of illuminating it. Such an interpreter, with the same machinery of criticism, would eliminate from the sacred record Christ's deity or humanity, as might happen to please his fancy; would convert God himself into a principle, and substitute for all the chief narratives of the Bible a train of myths and legends. And the moment we eject personality from the universe we put an end to responsibility, we make love and hate, which are the essence of virtue, impossible except in their lowest forms; in fact, we destroy moral gravitation, and set all the spheres careering wildly through a void emptied of all governing forces. We cannot in the highest sense love virtue, unless we see it in a person. We cannot hate evil with any zeal, unless it reveals its ugliness in personal character. We laugh at the Puritans for their belief in witches. But, after we have stripped off the cheap misrepresentation with which an ungrateful and irreverent posterity seem to delight in draping all their doings, we shall probably find that in this matter of evil spirits they were, as usual, much nearer right than their self-complacent critics.

"The first thing we have to do, then, in ‘fighting the devil’ is to see him, as David saw the giant striding across the valley of Epes-dammin. In fact, we had better see him as Luther did at Wartburg than not to see him at all; and if we can hurl the contents of our inkstand at him with as good effect as did the doughty reformer, we shall do good service in the great battle. In fact, there is nothing the Devil dreads so much as a plucky inkstand, unless it be a godly life. As soon as we get our eyes open, nothing will be easier than to see ‘THE TRADUCER’ (which is the translation of ‘Ho Diabolos’). He will appear on every side: ‘now squat like a toad’ at the ear of credulous innocence; now erect in a pulpit; now handling with shadowy fingers the delicate types of a popular magazine, or coarsely smoothing the columns of some daily newspaper; next blatant in a political caucus; plausible and orotund in the Senate Chamber, or dictating thick, tipsy words in the Cabinet, and constantly, with wonderful diligence and ubiquity, creeping into shops and stores, bar-rooms and drawing-rooms, inculcating the most monstrous lies, persuading men to believe the most patent absurdities on every conceivable subject, and shouting high above the rest the primal falsehood of them all, ‘Thou shalt not surely die.’ There is no hypothesis which so fully accounts for all the stupidities, sophistries, deceptions, and plottings, which penetrate society in every direction, like a net-work of electric wires, as the theory of a personal Devil commanding an army of inferior spirits ‘whose name is Legion,’ sitting himself as grand operator, at the central battery of mischief, thence directing ‘the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.’"