CHAPTER 9

Of the Hostile Power opposed to God, and of its Ruler, and how the Whole Race of Mankind was in Subjection thereto.

SUCH was their position. While those on the side of the opposing rebel power were either daemons, or vile spirits immersed more or less in wickedness, with the cunning ruler of them all the mighty daemon, who first failed of their reverence of the Divinity and fell from their own portion, when envy of man's salvation drew them the (d) contrary way, plotting with all sorts of evil devices against all the nations, and even against the Lord's portion in their jealousy of the good. It is this godless and unholy scheme of the great Daemon, which the prophetic spirit in Isaiah reproves in this way, saying:

"13. I will act in strength, and in the wisdom of understanding I will take away the boundaries of the nations, and will diminish their strength, 14. and I will shake inhabited cities. And the whole inhabited world I will take in my hand as a nest, and I will take them even as eggs that have been left; and none shall escape me or say me nay."

These are the words of God's antagonist, boasting in the strength of his wickedness, as he threatens to steal and obliterate the divisions of the nations delivered by the Most High to the angels, and loudly cries that he will spoil the earth, and shake the whole race of men, and change them from their former good order. But hear the same prophecy speak about him again, how he thought about himself and (b) how he bragged:

"How has Lucifer that rose at morn fallen from heaven: He is crushed to earth that sent to all the nations. But thou saidst in thy heart, 'I will go up to heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of heaven. ... I will ascend above the clouds, I will be

like the Most High.' But now thou shalt go down to hell, and to the foundations of the earth." 

Truly Scripture shews many things at once in this, the madness of the said spirit, his fall from the better to the worse, and the end of his fall. And having uttered terrible threats against all mankind, he discovered that men could be caught otherwise by his weapons, since they possessed in their power of free choice the ever-ready possibility of falling into evil from their own thoughts. Then he turned the conditions of states from the better to the worse, and drew away the souls of the multitude by the bait of pleasure to every form of wickedness, and left no sort of device untried, and with base myths of the gods and impure stories he tempted his victims with what they loved and with what gave them pleasure, using the artful deceit of the daemons. And in this way he took the whole world and held it captive, and obliterated the boundaries of the nations, as he had threatened to do when he said: "I will remove the boundaries of the nations, and I will diminish their strength, and I will take the whole world in my hand as a nest." And from that day forward he ruled all men with deceit, and the evil demons were arrayed under their king in every place and city and land. And thus the whole of human life was enslaved by earthly powers and evil spirits instead of the earlier ministers of God, and all gave themselves over in throngs and swiftly to the snares of pleasure; so that they soon overleapt the bounds even of nature, in unnatural offences of one kind or another, and they not only did things of which it is wrong even to think, but connected them with their conceptions of their own gods, and worked their lust with all the more freedom as a thing supposed to please the gods. Hence soon, according to the holy Apostle, they took no heed of the works of God still bright in heaven.

" They became vain in their reasonings: and their senseless heart was darkened. 22. Professing themselves (b) to be wise, they became fools. 23. And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things." [[Rom. i. 21.]]

And that in the earliest age those upon earth worshipped only the lights of heaven, and knew no image, nor were concerned with the error of the daemons, there is satisfactory proof to be found in the evidence of those, who are strangers to my argument, which I drew upon in the first book of the Preparatio (which I wrote) before the present treatise; (c) they clearly prove that the earliest men did not serve idols fashioned by hand from lifeless matter, nor even invisible daemons, but only those beings, which are said in Holy Scripture to have been distributed among the nations. It is time for the Greeks themselves, therefore, whose statements I have arranged in the work mentioned, to agree that the superstition connected with idols was something more recent and novel, being introduced subsequently to the worship of the ancients, as well as the devotion to unseen spirits. All this was the work of the said antagonist of God, who plotted against all those on earth. And all (d) the tribe of unclean spirits co-operated with him. Yea, he surely, the prince of evil himself, worked this result, fulfilling in very deed, in the madness of strange pride, the threats he had uttered against all men, raising the godless cry, "I will be like the Most High," and with the aid of impure and evil daemons offering oracles and cures and such like in response to human sorcery.