We cannot, of course, conceive that anything essen- tially and originally evil was created by God. We find by experience that the will of a free and rational creat- ure can, by his permission, oppose his will; that the verj' conception of freedom implies capacity of tempta- tion; and that every sin, unless arrested by God's fresh gift of grace, strengthens the hold of evil on the spirit till it may fall into the hopeless state of reprobation. We can only conjecture, therefore, that Satan is a fallen angel, who once had a time of probation, but whose condemnation is now irrevocably fixed.
3. The Scriptures are explicit as to the apostasy of some, of whom Satan was the chief and leader. But of the time, cause, and manner of his fall. Scripture tells us scarcely anything. It limits its disclosures, as al- ways, to that which we need to know. The passage on which all the fabric of tradition and poetr3' has been raised is Rev. xii, 7, 9, which speaks of "Michael and his angels" as "fighting against the dragon and his an- gels," till the "great dragon, called the devil and Satan," was "cast out into the earth, and his angels cast out with him." Whatever be the meaning of this passage, it is certain that it cannot refer to the original fall of Satan. The only other passage which refers to the fall of the angels is 2 Pet. ii, 4, " God spared not the angels, when they had sinned, but having cast them into hell, delivered them to chains of darkness {atipcuQ Z,i><pov TaprapMaag TraptdiOKer), reserved unto judgment," with the parallel passage in Jude 6, "Angels, who kept not their first estate {ri)v iavriov apx>]v), but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day," In these mysterious passages, however, there is some dif- ficulty in considering Satan as one of the rest, for they are in chains and guarded (rtTijpijiAivovi;) till tlie great day; he is permitted still to go about as the tempter and the adversary, until his appointed time be come. This distinction, nevertheless, may be due to Satan's eminence among his fellows. Those who adhered to Satan in his apostasy are described as belonging to him. The company is called " the devil and his angels" (Matt, xxv, 41). The relation marked here denotes the instrumentality which the devil may have exerted in inducing those called his angels to rebel against Jeho- vah and join themselves to Ids interests. Aside from these passages, we have still to consider the declaration of our Lord in Luke x, 18, " I beheld (iS'twpovv') Satan, as lightning, fall from heaven." This may refer to the fact of his original fall (although the use of the imper- fect tense and the force of the context rather refer it figuratively to the triumph of the disciples over the
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evil spirits); but, in any case, it tells nothing of its cause or method. There is also the passage already quoted (John viii, 44), in which our Lord declares of him, that •• he was a murderer from the beginning," that "he stands not (firrj/Kf) in the truth, because there is no truth in him," that "he is a liar, and tlie father of it." But here it seems likely the words cnr' "PX'lc refer to the beginning of liis action upon man; perhaps the allusion is to his temptation of Cain to be tlie first mur- derer— an allusion explicitly made in a similar passage in 1 John iii, 9-12. The word torj/Ks (wrongly ren- dered " abode" in the A. V.) and the rest of the verse refer to present time. The passage therefore throws little or no light on the cause and method of his fall. Perhaps the only one which has any value is 1 Tim. iii, 6, "lest being lifted up by pride he fall into the condem- nation (Kpij-ia) of the devil." It is concluded from this that pride was the cause of the devil's condemnation. The inferenice is a probable one; it is strengthened by the only analogy within our reach, that of the fall of man, in which the spiritual temptation of pride, the de- sire " to be as gods," was the subtlest and most deadh' temptation. Still it is but an inference; it cannot be regarded as a matter of certain revelation.
How Satan and his followers, being created so high in excellence and holiness, became sinful and fell is a question upon which theologians have differed, but which they have not settled. The difficulty has seemed so great to Schleiermacher and others that they have denied the fact of such an apostasy. They have untied the knot by cutting it. Still the difficulty remains. The denial of mystery is not the removal of it. Even philosophy teaches us to believe sometimes where we cannot understand. It is here that the grave question of the introduction of evil first meets us. If we admit the fact of apostasy among the angels, as by a fair in- terpretation (if Scripture we are constrained to do, the admission of such a fact in the case of hiniian beings will follow more easily, they being the lower order of creatures, in whom defection would be less surprising.