It is _antipathy_ that separates. "They did not like to retain God in their knowledge"; that is Paul's explanation of the ungodliness and vice of the ancient world. And it holds good still in countless instances. "Numbers in this bad world talk loudly against religion in order to encourage each other in sin, because they need encouragement. They know that they ought to be other than they are; but are glad to avail themselves of anything that looks like argument, to overcome their consciences withal" (Newman). The fashionable scepticism of the day too often conceals an inner revolt against the moral demands of the Christian life; it is the pretext of a carnal mind, which is "enmity against God, because it is not subject to His law." Christ's sentence upon unbelief as He knew it was this: "Light is come into the world; and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil." So said the keenest and the kindest judge of men. If we are refusing Him our faith, let us be very sure that this condemnation does not touch ourselves. Is there no passion that bribes and suborns the intellect? no desire in the soul that dreads His entrance? no evil deeds that shelter themselves from His accusing light?
When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that they "once walked in the way of the age, according to the course of this world,[76] according to the prince of the power of the air," the former part of his statement is clear enough. The age in which he lived was godless to the last degree; the stream of the world's life ran in turbid course toward moral ruin. But the second clause is obscure. The "prince" (or "ruler") who guides the world along its career of rebellion is manifestly Satan, the spirit of darkness and hate whom St Paul entitles "the god of this world" (2 Cor. iv. 4), and in whom Jesus recognized, under the name of "the prince of the world," His great antagonist (John xiv. 30).
But what has this spirit of evil to do with "the air"? The Jewish rabbis supposed that the terrestrial atmosphere was Satan's abode, that it was peopled by demons flitting about invisibly in the encompassing element. But this is a notion foreign to Scripture--certainly not contained in chapter vi. 12--and, in its bare physical sense, without point or relevance to this passage. There follows in immediate apposition to "the domain of the air, _the spirit_ that now works in the sons of disobedience." Surely, _the air_ here partakes (if it be only here) of the figurative significance of _spirit_ (i.e. _breath_). St Paul refines the Jewish idea of evil spirits dwelling in the surrounding atmosphere into an ethical conception of _the atmosphere of the world_, as that from which the sons of disobedience draw their breath and receive the spirit that inspires them. Here lies, in truth, the dominion of Satan. In other words, Satan constituted the _Zeitgeist_.
As Beck profoundly remarks upon this text:[77] "The Power of the air is a fitting designation for the prevailing spirit of the times, whose influence spreads itself like a miasma through the whole atmosphere of the world. It manifests itself as a contagious nature-power; and a _spiritus rector_ works within it, which takes possession of the world of men, alike in individuals and in society, and assumes the direction of it. The form of expression here employed is based on the conception of evil peculiar to Scripture. In Scripture, evil and the principle of evil are not conceived in a purely spiritual way; nor could this be the case in a world of fleshly constitution, where the spiritual has the sensuous for its basis and its vehicle. Spiritual evil exists as a power immanent in cosmical nature."[78] Concerning great tracts of the earth, and large sections even of Christianized communities, we must still confess with St John: "The world lieth in the Evil One." The air is impregnated with the infection of sin;[79] its germs float about us constantly, and wherever they find lodgement they set up their deadly fever. Sin is the malarial poison native to our soil; it is an epidemic that runs its course through the entire "age of this world."