3 books to know The Devil. Джон Мильтон
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through this whole fifteen hundred years, the Devil, having so effectually de bauched mankind, had advanced his infernal kingdom to a prodigious height; for the text says, the whole earth was filled with violence: in a word, blood, murder, rape, robbery, oppression and injustice, prevailed everywhere; and man, like the wild bear in the forest, lived by prey, biting and devouring one another.
At this time Noah begins to preach a new doctrine to them; for as he had before been a preacher of righteousness, now he becomes a preacher of vengeance; first he tells them they shall be all overwhelmed with a deluge, that for their sins God repented they were made, and that he would destroy them all; adding, that to prevent the ruin of himself and family, he resolved to build him a ship to have recourse to when the water should come over the rest of the world.
What jesting, what scorn, what contempt, did this work expose the good old man to for above one hundred years? for so long the work was building, as ancient authors say. Let us represent to ourselves in the most lively manner how the witty world at that time behaved to poor old Noah; how they took their evening walks to see what he was doing, and passed their judgment upon it, and upon the progress of it; I say, to represent this to ourselves, we need go no farther than to our own witticisms upon religion, and upon the most solemn mysteries of divine worship; how we damn the serious for enthusiasts, think the grave mad, and the sober melancholy; call religion itself flatus and hypo; make the devout ignorant, the divine mercenary, and the whole scheme of divinity a frame of priestcraft: and thus no doubt the building an ark or boat, or whatever they called it, to float over the mountains, and dance over the plains, what could it be but a religious frenzy, and the man that so busied himself, a lunatic? and all this in an age when divine things came by immediate revelation into the minds of men! The Devil must therefore have made a strange conquest upon mankind to obliterate all the reverence which but a little before was so strangely impressed upon them concerning their Maker.
This was certainly the height of the Devil’s kingdom, and we shall never find him arrive to such a pitch again; he was then truly and literally the universal monarch, nay, the god of this world; and, as all tyrants do, he governs them with an arbitrary, absolute sway; and had not God thought fit to give him a writ of ejectment, and afterwards drown him out of possession, I know not what would have been the case; he might have kept his hold, for aught I know, till the seed of the woman came to bruise his head, that is to say, cripple his government, dethrone him, and depose his power, as has been fulfilled in the Messiah.
But as he was, I say, drowned out of the world, his kingdom for the present was at an end; at least, if he had a dominion, he had no subjects; and as the creation was in a manner renewed, so the Devil had all his work to do over again. Unhappy man! how has he, by his weak resistance, made the Devil’s recovering his hold too easy to him, and given him all the advantages, except as before excepted, which he had before? Now whither he retired in the mean time, and how he got footing again after Noah and his family were landed upon the new surface, that we come next to inquire.
Chapter 10
OF THE DEVIL’S SECOND kingdom, and how he got footing in the renewed world by his victory over Noah and his race.
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THE STORY OF NOAH, his building the ark, his embarking himself and all nature’s stock for a new world on board it, the long voyage they took, and the bad weather they met with, though it would embellish this work very well, and come in very much to the purpose in this place; yet as it does not belong to the Devil’s story, for I cannot prove what some suggest; namely, that he was in the ark among the rest; I say, for that reason I must omit it.
And now having mentioned Satan’s being in the ark; as I say, I cannot prove it, so there are, I think, some good reasons to believe he was not there: first, I know no business he had there; secondly, we read of no mischief done there; and these joined together make me conclude he was absent; the last I chiefly insist upon, that we read of no mischief done there; which, if he had been in the ark, would certainly have happened; and therefore I suppose rather, that when he saw his kingdom dissolved, his subjects all ingulfed in an inevitable ruin and desolation, a sight suitable enough to him, except as it might unking him for a time: I say, when he saw this, he took care to speed himself away as well as he could, and make his retreat to a place of safety; where that was, is no more difficult to us, than it was to him.
It is suggested, that as he is prince of the power of the air, he retired only into that region. It is most rational to suppose he went no farther on many accounts, of which I shall speak by-and-by. Here he staid hovering in the earth’s atmosphere, as he has often done since, and perhaps now does; or, if the atmosphere of this globe was affected by the indraught of the absorption, as some think, then he kept himself upon the watch, to see what the event of the new phenomenon would be; and this watch, wherever it was, I doubt not, was as near the earth as he could place himself, perhaps in the atmosphere of the meon; or, in a word, the next place of retreat he could find.
From hence I took upon me to insist, that Satan has riot a more certain knowledge of events than we; I say, he has not a more certain knowledge; that he may be able to make stronger conjectures, and more rational conclusions from that he sees, I will not deny; and that which he most outdoes us in is, that he sees more to conclude from than we can; but I am satisfied he knows nothing of futurity more than we can see by observation and inference; nor, for example, did he know whether God would re-people the world any more or no.
I must therefore allow, that he only waited to see what would be the event of this strange eruption of water; and what God proposed to do with the ark, and all that was in it.
Some philosophers tell us, besides what I hinted above, that the Devil could have no retreat in the earth’s atmosphere; for that the air being wholly condensed into water, and having continually poured down its streams to deluge the earth, that body was become so small, and had suffered such convulsions, that there was but just enough air left to surround the water, or as might serve by its pressure to preserve the natural position of things, and supply the creatures in the ark with a part to breathe in.
The atmosphere indeed might suffer some strange and unnatural motions at that time, but not (I believe) to that degree; however, I will not affirm, that there could be room in it, or is now, for the Devil, much less for all the numberless legions of Satan’s host; but there was, and now certainly is, sufficient space to receive him, and a sufficient body of his troops for the business he had for them at that time, and that is enough to the purpose; or if the earth’s atmosphere did suffer any particular convulsion on that occasion, he might make his retreat to the atmosphere of the rnoon, or of Mars, or of Venus, or of any of the other planets; or to any other place; for he that, is prince of the air could not want retreats in such a case, from whence he might watch for the issue of things; certainly he did not go far, because his business lay here, and he never goes out of his way of doing mischief.
In particular, his more than ordinary concern was, to see what would become of the ark. He was wise enough, doubtless, to see, that God. who had directed its making, nay, even the very structure of it, would certainly take care of it, preserve it upon the water, and bring it to some place of safety or other; though where it should be, the Devil with all his cunning could not resolve, whether on the same surface, the waters drawing off, or in any other created, or to be created place; and this state of uncertainty beirf evidently his case, and which proves his ignorance of futurity, it was his business, I say, to watch with the utmost vigilance for the event.
If the ark was, (as Mr. Burnet thinks,) guided by two angels, they not only held it from foundering, or being swallowed up, in the water, but certainly kept the waters calm about it, especially when the Lord brought a strong wind to blow over the whole globe, which, by the way, was the firsthand, I suppose, the only universal storm that ever blew; for to be sure, it blew over the whole surface at once; I say, if it was thus guided, to be sure the Devil saw it, and that with envy and regret, that he could do it no injury; for, doubtless, had it been in the Devil’s power, as God had drowned the whole race of man, except what was in the ark, he would have taken care to have despatched