The autobiography of Satan...

Front matter

THE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF

Preface

ghosts and other imaginary beings was all but universal, I contracted fears and alarms which agitated and tortured me for many years, so that even the first days of my manhood were beclouded by their dark and spectral shadows. I have reason to believe that even in the more cultured classes of society many a nursery is still beset and worried by similar harpies, nor will the young be brought up in the pure and serene light of God's own lovely world until belief in the devil is banished for ever from the haunts of men.

I experienced in my boyhood acute pain from devilism in another shape. My father, a kind, intelligent and simple-minded man, had inherited a rigid Calvinism, by which he was almost driven to suicide. As his eldest child, I shared his inmost thoughts, and learnt how he had been tormented with the fear of hell, not being able, like some, to persuade himself that he was one of the few favourites of heaven. Happily for me, as well as for him, his earnest nature threw off the galling yoke just before I began to turn my thoughts to religious matters : yet my memory has ever retained a vivid sense of his perils and sufferings. The terrific system is now past the meridian of life, but similar fears and dangers will last as long as Satan endures as a personal reality. The stronghold of Satan is the Bible, yet Satanism is not a Biblical growth. This I take no small pains to shew, if only because I respect and love the Bible, and because I find in the Biblical religion, as represented by Jesus, the great hope of humanity. My efforts to eliminate Satan from the Bible, if successful, will owe the result to the exegetical resources supplied by w T hat I may term the new science of The History of 'Religion , which is gradually undermining many a theological falsity, while spreading the light of God's Fatherly Providence over the

PREFACE.

Vll wide surface of the human race, from its origin down to the present hour.

Of the professional ministers of religion there are many who, exercising their functions in the spirit of the Lord Jesus, hold high rank among "the salt of the earth." Such men, whatever their creed, whatever their position, I honour and love. These are not "the priests" whom I censure in some of the following pages. The term is meant to describe a caste, a power, a direction of clerical agency which thinks more of itself than its avowed Master, and labours for what is called " the Church " rather than for the real interests of beings who cannot be well off hereafter except so far as, in the true sense, they are well off here. To this professionalism the downfall of Satan would be ruinous. But then, under any circumstances, the reign of the priest cannot last very long in such days of light, liberty and moral power, as are already printed in God's Great Year Book ; and every true disciple of Christ will rejoice in the prospect of that copious outpouring of the Divine Spirit, which, neglecting all human "orders," ranks and distinctions, shall establish the universal priesthood of humanity, by fulfilling the promise given by the lips of Joel and repeated by those of Peter : " I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy (teach religion), and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, and on my servants and my handmaidens I will pour out of my Spirit, and they shall prophesy" (Joelii. 28, 29; Acts ii. 17).

John E. Beard.

The Meadows,.

Ashton-on-Mersey, near Manchester, March, 1872.

CONTEXTS.

Book I. INTRODUCTORY

Chapter I. page What I am and what I am not 1

Chapter II. How I came lxto Existence 3

Section 1. Logical Grenesis of the Idea of Satan. — Section 2. Exclusive Prevalence of the Dark Side of the Dualism. — Section 3. The Dualism is thrown into Confusion by Ecclesiasticism. — Section 4. Extreme Credulity the Channel through which Belief in a Personal Devil has been propagated. — Section 5. The Creative Power of the Imagination has contributed to Belief in a Personal Devil ; the Fact illustrated from Dante and Milton. — Section 6. Fear engenders Mental Deceptions, including Belief in a Personal Devil ; the Terrifying Pulpit ; the Heralds' College of Demonology ; Satanic Aristocracy ; vulgar Devils.

Book III. PERIOD OF COMPOSITION : MY CONNECTION WITH THE BIBLE

Chapter I. page The Old Testament : the Shemitic or Hebrew Element 65

Section 1. The strict Monotheism of the Religion of Moses. — Section 2. Devilism condemned in the Old Testament. — Section 3. The first Account of Creation ignores Satan. — Section 4. Satan in the Book of Job. — Section 5. The Four remaining Passages of the Old Testament in which the word Satan is used considered : Conclusion.

Chapter II.

The Aryan or Pagan Element : "The Fall," an Allegory in

Pictures 90

Chapter III

The Jewish Element as seen in the Old Testament Apocrypha ; Alexandrine Demonology ; Josephus ; the Pseudepigraphs op the Old Testament ; the Book op Enoch ; the Talmud and Cabbalists 103

Chapter IV. The New Testament 120

Section 1. Jude ; the Apocalypse ; the Epistle of Peter ; the Epistles of Paul ; the Epistle of James ; the Book of Acts. — Section 2. The Grospels : John, Matthew, Mark, Luke.

Book VII. PERIOD OF DECOMPOSITION : DEBASEMENT : DECLINE

Chapter I. page My Transformations _ 278

Chapter II.

Am I a Person or am I a Power ? — The Verdict of Art 292

Chapter III.

Am I a Person or am I a Power? — The Crucial Test... 302

Chapter IV.

Ecclesiastical Tradition concerning me halts in its Course ... 311

Chapter V.

Luther sustains my tottering Throne 318

Chapter VI.

Attack and Defence : Bekker, Henry More and Goadby 329

Chapter VII.

Efforts for my Revival : De Foe, Wesley and Doddridge 342

Chapter I. What I A3i Axd What I Am Not

The aged, feeling premonitions of decline, are apt to look back and survey the past. If they become aware that, whatever the cause, they suffer in public opinion, they naturally take up the pen and write their own biography. Such is my condition. Through you, my gentle Theophilus, whom I have trained in letters from your childhood, and who still act as my amanuensis, I shall hand the following narrative to the public. To you I am known nearly as well as to myself, for your love of reality is intense, and the simplicity of your character guarantees the truth of what you directly or indirectly declare. A pure channel, such as you present, is what I desire. What else could answer my purpose when I am about to supersede a huge and terrific falsity by a certain and most beneficial truth 1 The falsity is, that I am a personal concentration of transcendental vice, wickedness and woe. The truth which I wish to substitute is, that I am a personification of the dark side of humanity and the universe. Being, as such, an impalpable presence, I exist in every land and occupy a corner in every human heart. A reflection of the

B

ABSOLUTE EVIL HAS XO EXISTENCE.

outer world of matter and the inner world of mind, I am not all dark, nor could I ever have been painted black had not theological speculation first thrown its own murky clouds over the heart of man and over the creation of God. The human soul in ruins and the world under its Maker's curse inevitably perpetuated that incarnation of Evil which theologians call the Devil or Satan. The terrific figment came the more readily into vigour, because, while a shadow from man's own baseness, it served as a substitute for his relief and a palliation of his guilt.

Bad as he is, the Devil may be abused, Be falsely charged and causelessly accused, When men, unwilling to be blamed alone, Shift off on him the crimes that are their own.

The clerical description of me makes me out to be an impersonation of absolute malignity. The existence of such a frightful monstrosity I confidently deny. Absolute evil can have no existence in a universe made and sustained by the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Absolute evil and absolute good exclude each other. If God is, I am not ; if I am, God is not. Two absolutes are impossibilities. Make your choice between me and your Creator. You cannot logically own both.

Yet I am a power. I am a power under God, and as such I perform a task which, however unlovely and however painful, is destined to put forward God's wise and benignant purposes for the good of man. What I am in full, the following pages will report. Enough to add in these introductory remarks, that I am an image of the evil that is in man arising from his divinely-given liberty of moral choice. That evil I discipline and correct as well as represent, and so I am also a divine schoolmaster to bring the world to God. My origin is human, my sphere of action earthly, my final end dissolution. Evil must cease when good is universal. AVhile, then, I cannot boast of a heavenly birth, I disown

I AM A PERSONIFICATION OF THE DARK SIDE OF THINGS. 3 fiendish dispositions. Worse than the worst man I cannot be. I am indeed a sort of mongrel, born, bred, reared and nurtured of human fancy, folly and fraud. As such, I possess a quasi omnipresence and a quasi omniscience ; for I exist wherever man exists, and, dwelling in human hearts, know all that men think, feel and do. Hence I have power to tempt and mislead, and that power, when I am in my worst moods, I am pleased to exercise. Yet in even these my lowest qualities I could find my equals in courts and camps, not to say in Jesuitical colleges and monkish cells. I have no wish to set myself off by disparaging others, but hardly will even my defamers ascribe to me such qualities as hypocrisy, meanness, shabbiness, and a number of other low and sordid features which hold prominence in characters that stand well in the eyes of the world and are not without influence in the church.

Chapter II. How I Came Into Existence

SECTION I.

LOGICAL GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF SATAN.

Great and eager has been the dispute as to my origin. Some say that I co-existed from the first with the Creator of the universe. Some say that I am one of his own creatures. This presents the metaphysical view of my origin. The historical view makes me to have been in the beginning one of the heavenly host who lost their celestial position by losing their moral purity. Another historical version connects me with the daughters of men, by union with whom I parted with my angelical nature and became Satanical.

In truth, I am the child of human speculation. And this

b 2

4 man's sense of inferiority the source of religion.

speculation, surviving still, though in a sickly form, goes back to the earliest dawn of man's logical faculty. I came into existence on the first clay that man asked himself, " "Whence this world in which I live and of which I am a part ?"

Untold ages had passed before the sons of man grew to be capable of conceiving that question. Xot knowing good from evil, they had no curiosity about either. In their earliest condition, they were confounded with the universe of which they were an almost totally unconscious part. Xot until the long and varied discipline of what is called evil, as well as good, had developed their higher nature, did they become conscious of themselves, as a distinct and separate part of the universe, hying on the bosom of the great mother, they drank in life unconsciously from her nutritious bosom : and only when weaned by her provident hand and whipped by her corrective rod, did they begin to feel that she was not they, and that they were not she.

And yet the separation was but partial. So linked together were mother and child, that, though the umbilical cord was snapt, the connection was rather altered than broken. Living on in nature, men felt and owned the intimacy of their kinship. After all, she was their mother and their nurse. After all, they were her children and dependents.

And so it has come about that some philosophers have asserted that the sense of dependence is the source of religion in man. Doubtless it is a source of religion in man, but not so much in its own form as in a deeper one, out of which the sense of dependence springs. The sense of dependence is rather an inference than a primary sentiment. It is an act of logic, and not of moral intuition. You must descend into man's instinctive nature, where rise all the springs of his higher life, if you would get to the source of his religious sentiments and apprehensions. In presence of the universe, man's first conscious feeling was a sense of inferiority. This arose in him spontaneously, as he lay there for the first time at the great maternal breast. The moment his eye opened on

THE FIRST FORM OF WORSHIP IS THE WORSHIP OF FEAR. 5

his mother's eye, he fell back in a depressing sense of inferiority and unworthiness. It was the half- terrified feeling of the yet unassured, but semi-conscious babe. Xor was it, until repeated experiences had corrected the sentiment, that a certain trust sprang up, to be speedily supplemented and recompensed by gratitude.

This sense of inferiority has its inseparable counterpart in a recognition of the superiority of the nursing mother. Accordingly the idea of God in its earliest and essential element is the idea of transcendency. Nature is greater than man. But nature, if not an unmeaning sound, is a being, since man is a being. And not a being only, but a conscious being ; for man, who owns the superiority of nature, is a conscious being. YLoreover, that being is invisible, for it is not apprehended by the bodily eye. Yet traces of its existence and operation appear on every side. Consequently an invisible being, superior to man, exists in the entire universe. As existing, as operating, as the source of sunshine and the fruits of the earth, it must receive a name. It is called God. God then is the invisible and transcendent source of man's continued existence. What God supports must have God for its author. This is man's first creed — and his last is but a development of the first. It is a natural and so a credible result of the influences in which man stands in their working in, upon, and with the deepest feelings of his nature.

The faith at first is vague and dim. Yet, as corresponding to man's nature and as connected with his inmost feelings and actions, it proves beneficial. Under its operation man's intrinsic qualities come forth, raising, refining and strengthening his whole being.

Originally the predominant sentiment of man in view of God was fear, an inevitable result of his own inherent sense of inferiority. Accordingly fear is historically known to exist in all low nations in their view of God. The earliest worship of the Biblical peoples was the worship of fear. The worship of love was a very late after-growth. This worship of fear

ROOT OF THE IDEA OF " THE FALL OF THE ANGELS."

arises straightway from the sense of inferiority. That sense implies that he by whom it is felt is a mere weakling, as compared with God, the author of the universe. The first form of worship is consequently the worship of power. In full agreement with this general fact, the book of Genesis, in its first verse, makes God power, the very name denoting power, or rather the concentration of the powers.

Now power has two aspects. It is either beneficent or maleficent, at least in appearance. Our metaphor of the nursing mother suggests that the beneficent aspect of power was the first recognized by man in point of time. But here it is easy to be mistaken. Some fostering influences there must have been open to man as soon as he saw the light of day, else the earliest moment of his existence and his latest would have stood in close proximity. Yet life must have been a struggle — a struggle, however, which for a time issued in victory, since the race succeeded the individual. Undoubtedly, darkness as well as light characterized man's earliest days : which of the two predominated, so far as man's consciousness went, no clear indication enables the student to determine definitively.

One averment may, however, be made of this beginning of man's religious life. It involves an ideal ; or, rather, it is the ideal. Man's conception of God is man's ideal. The ideal is recognized in his own conscious inferiority. " That power which I feel and own is superior, incomparably superior, to myself." He is superior, transcendentally superior, in power. In this recognition lies enfolded the whole history of religion, considered as representing a growth and an expansion in the human race. The elevating influence which has been already ascribed to faith gradually raises men in the scale of being. As they rise, their ideal ascends ; and ascend it must, because the very essence of religion is a sense of inferiority on the part of man. Man can worship only what he feels to be superior to himself. In other words, man's religion is necessarily man's ideal. Hence, as fast as man rises to a level

ORIGIN OF MONOTHEISM.

with his God, his actual God begins to wane and sink from sight. Hence a succession of divine dynasties is inevitable. Chronos is supplanted by Jove. To speak more correctly, man's idea of God is an ascensional idea. The worship called forth by power begets the worship of love. Elohim is superseded by " our Father." In this gradual clearing up of man's idea of God, God's unity comes, in the lapse of centuries, to find recognition and advocacy. In the beginning? the ideas of unity and plurality are too abstract to be owned. Man's conception is no less confused than shadowy. He sees and worships God in the sun ; scarcely less does he own him in the moon and in the stars. The nature-worship which this implies is the worship of a natural power with the aid of personification. In time, however, the question is forced on the conscious and reflective intellect, "Are these all gods ?" By and by there comes for answer, " They are not separate gods, but forms and manifestations of one God." Then an Abraham appears to inaugurate the reign of monotheism. And that monotheism, as affirmed and represented by him, is of so rigorous a kind as to exclude all duality. God is, God is one, God is power, God is good, God is the Father of all, are the successive stages through which man's thought, call it, as you will, either a recognition or a revelation, it is in reality both — these are the successive stages ; the rounds in the ladder on which man ascends to God, and God, as in Jacob's dream, comes down in augelic forms to man.

It is, however, only the loftiest natures, like that of Abraham, Moses, David, the Hebrew prophets — it is only the most thoroughly religious souls, that can and do see God as he is, in his own essential and unshared spiritual oneness ; and none has had the light and jo} r of the beatific vision in clearness, distinctness and fulness, but " the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. ii. 15), who in consequence is in that vision one with God (John x. 30). Yet it must be added as a necessary qualification, that absolutely God is known and apprehended

8 THE IDEA OF SATAN SPRINGS FROM MAN'g SELF-ESTEEM.

only by God. The Divine consciousness, which is the consciousness of the all-pervading self, is in its nature incommunicable. Could it be shared, monotheism would not be the one true religion. There is, however, an anterior state of the religious sense, and that state, going back to the dawn of human culture, never ceases wholly to exist, except in the princes and. kings of the religious hierarchy. That state postulates Satan as the inevitable antithesis of God. This dualism, like all first things on earth, has a physical origin. Whether man's earliest conception of God lay in the acknowledgment of his beneficent or of his maleficent aspect, doubtless the two existed and co-existed very soon. The elements of both, as apprehended by man, lie around him in his cradle. Day and night may serve as their representatives. Certainly the contrast of light and darkness begins with man s infantile recognitions and ends with his loftiest culture — though in the later stages the two are simple figures of speech. But the great source of the natural dualism is man's own apparently twofold nature. Man is conscious of what he calls bad feelings as well as good. This consciousness, in its origin and earlier ttnfoldings, is, if not strictly physical, certainly not properly ethical. Only later on in man's growth does the general sentiment take a moral character. In that chancre I am born. My existence is primarily due to man's self-esteem acting on his acknowledgment of wrong motives and wrong actions. Vicarious religion is the root of religious errors, and vicarious religion is a rank growth of an overweening idea of self. " Xo, that revenge, that lust, that malice, is not mine. I am not so base : it comes to me : it is forced upon me : either it is from a false accuser or an adversary, but it is not from my own heart ; the resistance I offer is the proof ; besides, I love it not, but hate it ; how can it then be mine ? Perhaps I am my own false accuser, my own adversary, torturing mvself bv mv own fancies ? . . . I am not so silly. Does it proceed from disease of body ? disease of mind ? I am sound and vigorous in both. Xo ; it has its origin out

VICARIOUS SIX VICARIOUS HOLINESS.

of myself. Witness the suddenness of its appearance. Evil thoughts come uninvited and unsuspected. They are clearly infused, aye, often thrust in ; they take possession of me as by storm. The adversary is without ; at least lie is another than myself ; one morally inferior to myself, yet having power to enter my heart and lead me astray. This is the only true solution. There is an adversary, perhaps a troop of adversaries."

Hence the superstition of the Satanic host. One superstition begets another in its own likeness. Having thus thrown their demerits on another, in another's merits men find their own. And the vicarious sacrifice of Christ is but the necessary complement of the vicarious wickedness of Satan. The twins will die at the same moment.

Am I interested in their demise ] Yes, for my death presupposes the perfection of human nature and the supremacy of God. And in those two sublime realities all real good is absorbed and centered. The death of Satan is the death of the great adversary of God and man. That most desirable result I hope to accelerate in giving a somewhat detailed history of the rise, progress and decline of the darkest fiction and hugest falsity that ever overshadowed and harassed the human race.

Section II. Exclusive Prevalence Of The Dark Side Of The Dualism

In the lower races and under unfavourable external influences, the recognition of God either arises in a faint and evanescent form, or seems almost to sink and disappear. Ecclesiastical shortsightedness and the tyranny of narrow dogmas may have concealed the recognition from the eyes of imperfectly informed and meanly cultivated travellers on the one side, or gone far to efface it on the other ; yet after due allowance has been made for mental blindness and the exaggeration of system, prejudice and caste, the impartial observer is com-

SATAX IMPLICATES MAGIC.

pelled by facts to admit, together with the moral degradation, the almost utter religious insensibility of many tribes and populations still existing on the surface of the earth, and which may justifiably be put into the class of Turanians. These low and debased herds of men, women and children do indeed reproduce in modern days the earliest and semi-barbarous peoples which represent that family of men in the earlier ages. If class names were given in virtue not so much of consanguinity as moral condition, the scale of culture at its lowest figures could be too easily filled in with names as savage as those of the days of Cain.

As it is in the normal man that the idea of God germinates, blossoms, and produces sound and nutritious fruit, so all abnormal conditions of humanity are adverse and even deadly to the thought. Yet never can man wholly escape from the idea of power superior to himself. If God is not owned, Satan takes his place. And wherever Satan is, some black art or the other prevails. Magic may be taken to represent the preternatural control which priestcraft or jugglery of some kind exercises over man in the abuse of the acknowledgment of God. Indeed, magic is the reality that is denoted by the name Satan. The two words are interchangeable. What ecclesiastically is called the devil, may be said to require the historical name of magic. In this sense I am the great and universal magician. A magician as a man would be contemptible, even in ignorant and brutish races, did he not contrive to persuade his dupes that he was sustained and led by an invisible and mighty power. In the mental confusion which attaches to all inferior natures, a man led by me becomes a devil himself. The identification is often aided by religious falsities and incantations. Even the art of healing conduces to the deception. " The medicine man" of a semi-barbarous tribe is often little else than Satan incarnate.

Among barbarous populations, magic, if not religion itself, is its most important observance. The magician is the arbiter of the destinies of men and society. He fixes the hour for

THE FETICISM OF THE LOWER RACES OF MEN. 11 undertakings and combats ; he points out the most prolific water for fishing and the most promising grounds for hunting. By invoking the aid of the devil, he heals the sick and revives the dying. In all uncivilized lands, if the sea is lashed into fury, it is done by my hand; if the winds roar and threaten a tempest, I "ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm if a volcano bursts into pyramids of flames and lava, it is my ■wrath, that burns and devastates. In the eyes of the native Polynesians, when the earth trembles, when wigwams totter and fall to ruin, when families are engulfed, the evil power Pelo is venting his destructive rage.

Black races, which in certain lands seem to possess little more of humanity than its form and some sort of articulate speech, are the most superstitious, and consequently most under the control of magicians. It is a popular pleasure to the native of Xew Guinea to pick up the grigris or fetiches, to arrange them in the consecrated forms, to decorate his bow and his lance with them, to offer them presents, to salute them, to put up to them his prayers. A feather, a little bone, a brilliant insect, the eye of a jackal, a serpent's tooth, a living snake — these are his protecting genii, his powerful divinities. But the superstitions of black men are not always so little baneful. Fearfully cruel are the manners of the Caff res, presided over by sortilege or the casting of lots ; no less horrid the human sacrifices which the terrible Bengeulans, on the western shore of Africa, offer to the devil ; sacrifices preceded by magical conjurations during an entire day, and followed by banquets of human flesh and strong drink. " It is," says a priest of the Eoman Church, " it is the most solid victory that Satan has gained over the fallen race of men, to persuade them to feast on one another." Dread of the Congos, as the magical rulers of Congo, is universal. Those gods on earth have skill to calm the hurricane, to implore disease away, to bring ruin on lands and hamlets. The king himself bends before their chief, who bears the title of Cha-Coutho.

12 SAT AX WORSHIPED INSTEAD OF GOD.

The Albinos of Loango are sorcerers by privilege of birth, and live at the public cost ; their mokissos or demons are, however, less cruel than those of Benguela.

The natives of Tucopia (New Hebrides) never undertake a maritime expedition without having launched into the bosom of the sea a canoe bedecked with flowers and ornamented with plumes, to conjure the spirits of the tempests by offering that nutriment to their fury. The same was done by the Egyptians and other nations of antiquity. At Nitendi and in the isles of Solomon the magicians are accounted organs of Satan, who throws them on the ground, transports them from place to place, and, during a superinduced insensibility, plunges them into the most violent contortions. On recovering their senses, or, as the phrase is, when the evil Spirit quits them, they utter a sudden, sharp and piercing cry, which relieves the bosom whence it comes. These recall to mind the demoniacs of the New Testament. In Borneo and other savage places, where no worship is addressed to the'Deity, and where I am alone believed in, being the perpetual object of popular terrors, magic is equally universal and baneful.