^f In a letter to his friend F. J. A. Hort, Maurice writes : " You think you do not find a distinct recognition of the devil's personality in my books. I am sorry if it is so. I am afraid I have been corrupted by speaking to a polite congregation. I do agree with my dear friend Charles Kingsley, and admire him for the boldness with which he has said that the devil is shamming dead, but that he never was busier than now. I do not know what he is by theological arguments, but I know by what I feel. I am sure there is one near me accusing God and my brethren to me. He is not myself ; I should go mad if I thought he was. He is near my neighbours ; I am sure he is not identical with my neighbours. I must hate them if I believed he was. But oh ! most of all, I am horror-struck at the thought that we may con- found him with God ; the perfect darkness with the perfect light. I dare not deny that it is an evil will that tempts me ; else I should begin to think evil is in God's creation, and is not the revolt from God, resistance to Him. If he is an evil will, he must, I think, be a person. The Word upholds his existence, not his evil. That is in himself ; that is the mysterious, awful possibility implied in his being a will. I need scarcely say that I do not mean by this acknowledgment of an evil spirit that I acknowledge a material devil. But does any one ? "
In a subsequent letter, Maurice relates that " Mr. Hall, the Baptist preacher, was once accosted by one of his confrires : ' Sir, do not you believe in the devil ? ' ' No, sir,' he answered ; ' I believe in God. Do not you ? ' Now he had an intense feeling of the devil as his personal and constant enemy ; but he kept his belief for his everlasting friend." x
Tj Between these two classes, of the happy and the heartless, there is a mediate order of men both unhappy and compassionate, who have become aware of another form of existence in the world, and a domain of zoology extremely difficult of vivisection — the diabolic. These men, of whom Byron, Burns, Goethe, and Carlyle are in modern days the chief, do not at all feel that the Nature
1 Life of Frederick Dcnison Maurice, ii. 21, 403.
ZECHARIAH in. i, 2 419
they have to deal with expresses a Feast only; or that her mysteries of good and evil are reducible to a quite visible Kosmos, as they stand ; but that there is another Kosmos, mostly invisible, yet perhaps tangible, and to be felt if not seen.
Without entering upon the question how men of this inferior quality of intellect become possessed either of the idea — or sub- stance— of what they are in the habit of calling " the Devil " ; nor even into the more definite historical question, "how men lived who did seriously believe in the Devil " — (that is to say, every saint and sinner who received a decent education between the first and the seventeenth centuries of the Christian era) — I will merely advise my own readers of one fact respecting the above-named writers — that they, at least, do not use the word " Devil " in any metaphorical, typical, or abstract sense, but — whether they believe or disbelieve in what they say — in a dis- tinctly personal one : and farther, that the conceptions or imagina- tions of these persons, or any other such persons, greater or less, yet of their species — whether they are a mere condition of diseased brains, or a perception of really existent external forces, — are nevertheless real Visions, described by them "from the life," as literally and straightforwardly as ever any artist of Rotterdam painted a sot — or his pot of beer : and farther — even were we at once to grant that all these visions — as for instance Zechariah's, " I saw the Lord sitting on His Throne, and Satan standing at His right hand to resist Him," are nothing more than emanations of the unphosphated nervous matter — still, these states of delirium are an essential part of human natural history : and the species of human Animal subject to them, with the peculiar characters of the phantoms which result from its diseases of the brain, are a much more curious and important subject of science than that which principally occupies the scientific mind of modern days.1
2. This is the secret of the slow progress of Christ's Kingdom. " He shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand." Who is this Joshua but the representative of Jesus, our great High Priest within the veil ? The names " Joshua " and " Jesus " are identical, and, being interpreted, mean " Jehovah, the Saviour." When the Jews were struggling, amidst diverse hardships, to build up their Temple at Jerusalem, the prophet was taught the secret of the opposition they met with by being made to behold in vision the then head of the Israelitish Church, and Satan close by resisting 1 Raskin, Deucalion, vol. ii. chap. ii. § 21 ( Works, xxvi. 344).