From “Tracts for To-Day,” 1859.

NOT more surely are the little coral insects under the waters building the reefs which already foreshow the physical connection of Florida with the Indies, at a remote period, than that all the experiences of life, the accumulation of knowledge, grain by grain though it is, have decided that as mythologies, witchcraft, fairy realms have been appropriated, so prodigies, special providences, fire and brimstone, devils, shall be joined to the solid continent of our many-sided human nature. Also, that beautiful golden Isle of the Blest, so far out on the Sea of the Unknown, that it seems a beautiful cloud-bar of Heaven, we shall one day see, from the outlook of self-knowledge, to be the fairer realm of the heart, to which all breezes blow for the soul which launches bravely forth, content on earth with nothing less than Heaven.

  That these doctrines and superstitions are part of us, incidental to the organic development of the human race, is proved by the variety of conceptions of a Devil which have existed. His phases vary with the race. Different countries have as distinctive fauna of imps as of animals. The rule of races is unswerving and universal: some races do not have consumption, nor the measles, and other diseases which are so common with the Anglo-Saxon. So we rarely have the tapeworm and goitre, which some peoples are afflicted with. Certain connections are decided to subsist between certain people and their diseases. So each race has a special and distinct Devil related to its temperament. We have already seen what a severe and dignified Greek Pluto was. But he was not a generalization of all evil. The Greek mind, fond of definition, gave each department of evil to a special representative. The Furies were an instance of this precision in the distribution of labor.

  The Oriental mind, less philosophical but more poetic, either resolved all into one all-enfolding being, as Brahma, to whom good and evil were alike pleasing; or, as with the Persians, had a good and an evil being, Ormuzd and Ahriman. This Ahriman, the Persian Satan, was in all the Universe in deadly grip with Ormuzd,—they, and only they, met in every atom or event, as sea meets shore. Thus we see these Devils were but projections of the respective characteristics of the two races,—that men make their own Devils.

  But there are instances more to our hand, in the Devils which still live in our classic literature. Here is the English Devil, delineated by Milton. He is an aristocratic Devil, full of importance and will, out-spoken and natural,—the Devil of common sense; with a constant undertone of truthfulness in all he says, which at times easily rises to heroism, as where he cries, carrying in sympathy every Englishman who reads: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!”

  The German Devil is as different as the complexion of the German is different. In the national legend of the Devil and Dr. Faustus, we have a much more philosophical being altogether. The temptation which the Evil Spirit offers his victim, is (if we follow the most ancient legend), knowledge. An Englishman or Yankee would think a Devil very surely an ass, as the proverb says he is, if he should think to purchase their souls with a promise of knowledge. If it were a throne, as Milton’s Devil would offer, the Englishman would be tempted; and the American might sell his soul perhaps for Cuba or Nicaragua,—but knowledge! what but a transcendental German Devil would ever think of inveigling a soul by any such thing as that!

  When we read the old legend of St. Anthony tempted by the Devil in the form of a lean monk, who supposes that it was anything more than an outward shape given by the old man’s creed to an apprehension that in the desert he would be himself only a lean monk, having all the inconveniences attached thereunto?

  George Herbert (and I wish history bore witness to more souls of his high insight among the old English Churchmen) has said: “Devils are our sins in perspective.” The whole of his ode on sin is of such depth and truth that I gladly quote it here:—

  Sin is negative, privative, not real and absolute; it wants, as Herbert says, the good of Being. It does not exist; it is so much death. It is that hard block of stone which has not yet crumbled off beneath the sun to form the stems of plants and bones of animals. Sin in us is as impenetrability in matter.

  We have already suggested the reason of our thus personifying our evil tendencies as Devils. First, there is the law that forces are always personified until analyzed. Superstition is the counterpart of ignorance; for men feel that they are systematically ruled by what they understand not: the disposition to do wrong arises without seeming exercise of the will, and against all convictions and traditions. The old Latin poet states the case well enough:—

  There is an unconsciousness of the door, whereby such desires enter; and when the force of the moral nature is not sufficient to resist this spiritual highwayman, we do not feel that the whole burden of the evil should rest on ourselves, so we divide the guilt with the Devil. Men can never believe that they are so wicked as the appearances would make out. Adam, when asked, says, “It was the woman”; Eve says, “It was the serpent,” and so on. We see the same law of unconsciousness working in the other direction, in inspiration. Socrates, unable to trace the secret trapdoors by which his wisdom entered, was accustomed to speak of his Daimon; when we have insight, the logical steps of which cannot be traced, we call it intuition, which is also only one remove from the Daimon of Socrates; and both are confessions of our ignorance of metaphysical processes. But because these presentiments, prejudices, impressions, intuitions are so inevitably upon us, not coming through will or coercion, men are all the more convinced of their truth; they are the structural action of the nature given us, and so we say: “Thus saith the Lord”; since he gave us the constitution which reports thus and so.

  There is nothing acrid to be said to those who have taught this doctrine of a Devil: it grew naturally, and its root is not bitter but sweet. It was a strong and successful effort to maintain a God in the universe. The first doubt which impeded the natural flow of the reason from an effect—such as the world—to a cause, was a moral one, and was inspired by the existence of evil. If there be a God or Good, whence come plagues, tempests, afflictions, passions, villains, imperfections? So an Evil Spirit was evoked as a relief of God from an imagined stigma. But this was only a truce between the human reason and the problem which it was called to contend with and solve. It was soon found that the difficulty returned in another shape. Who made the Devil, and empowered or permitted him to have this great power on earth? But when this stage of the difficulty arrived, the human mind had advanced sufficiently to contend with the problem of evil in itself, and not as affecting God. It did not relieve men from the pestilence to say there is no God.

  And from this first effort to enter the central fact of evil, the Devil began to be less hated and abused, indeed, it was felt that he had been treated in an ungentlemanly manner, and the world was eager under the revulsion to make the amende honorable. So arose several proverbs of the same spirit with the familiar one, “Give the Devil his due.” It was said, “The Devil is not so black as he is painted.” There was thus the dawn of a grand truth that there was method in this seeming madness of evil, whose result has been to convince thinkers that just as surely as every wind and storm, hitherto symbols of freedom, has had its necessary path mapped out, and is demonstrated to be confined to its channel as is the Ohio, so these uncontrollable storms of passion and currents of evil shall one day find the Maury to make their chart.

  It were a curious investigation to mark the development of this embryo which shows where our philosophy of evil began. The popular instinct, as we have seen, had given the direction. More especially might it be expected that a people whose mythology related that when the beautiful Balder, child of the sun, was dead, Hela, the goddess of the Underworld, agreed that he should be restored if there should be found on earth those who wept for him, should presently have a Burns who, instead of venting curses on “Auld Nickie Ben,” should appeal affectionately: “Ah, wad ye tak a thought an mend!” and that it should produce a less genial, more philosophic brain in Goethe to state the truth frankly. I may refer particularly to the question and answer which passed between Faust and Mephistophiles, when the latter met him in the guise of a traveling student:—

  And is it not true that death is as good as birth; that lower forms must die that higher may be developed from them; that seed must rot that the full ear may appear; that because all that is lower must die, it must have the evil element in it, which is its sealed bond to that nothingness which men call Satan?

  Was it not reverence for the highest which made Carlyle call this phantom, evil, Satan, the great Second-Best?

  Unless we say thus, how is reason satisfied? We have only to answer those who would maintain the dogma of the existence of a powerful spirit completely malicious and absolutely evil, how are they to answer poor Friday’s obvious question to Crusoe, “Why not God kill debbil?” Either it must be said: “God is not able,” or “there is a good reason for the existence of evil.” Thus alone could it exist under an Omnipotent Being, who is also purely good.

  It is a metaphysical impossibility to conceive of the existence of an absolute evil intelligence anywhere; for that would imply the eternity of evil in the universe, and affirm the existence of some portion of his creation where God is forever dethroned and powerless. But David cried: “If I make my bed in Hell, thou art there.”

  It seems to me that the doctrine known as “arrested development,” which has had such a tremendous influence in natural history, will also apply here. Every animal is a man in this arrested development. The quadruped develops more and becomes an ape; arrested there for an æon the development rises to the savage; the next wave of the onflowing tide of life rises to man,—no longer arrested and bound to the earth by his forefeet, as in the wolf, nor only partially released as in the orang-outang, nor held by passion and ignorance, as in the savage. The harelip which we see in men at times is the arrest of the lip in its development; but every lip is, at one stage of its embryonic growth, a harelip. Sometimes the hand is arrested, and remains more like that of an ape. But the animals also have dispositions which enter man to partake his spiritual development,—ferocity, passion, meanness, deceit, and so on. Here, too, is “arrested development”; one man does not get beyond the serpent; another finds that he has difficulty in passing the condition of a bear; another is arrested at the hyena. How familiar is the class of calves and donkeys walking on two feet around us! This is the path we all travel, even though at length we beat down the animal beneath our feet; and evil is only the living out among men of their arrested developments.

  A hard and long way is this we are journeying from the confines of our being to the centre,—from outlooks to insight,—from seeing ourselves in the huge, vague, distorted mirage forms of legends, superstitions, and dreams, to all those grand and glowing heights and depths which are really within us, of which the others are but first faint hints. “Go on, my son,” said the old man to his son, who feared to go alone into the dark, “go on; thou shalt see nothing worse than thyself.” To man, we say: Enter the universe here from thy earth threshold bravely, cheerfully; nothing shalt thou find worse than thyself: and, thyself being right, thou shalt see, with old Nailor the Quaker, the end of all destruction, of all evil; above the sea of darkness, beneath a greater sea of light, all-victorious light which, filling thee in that instant, filleth all without and beyond.