John Milton - 3 books to know The Devil

This sowing the seeds of strife in the world, and bringing nations to fight and make war upon one another, would take up a great part of the Devil’s history, and abundance of extraordinary things would occur in relating the particulars; for there have been very great conflagrations kindled in the world by the artifice of hell, under this head, namely, of making war; in which it has been the Devil’s master-piece, and he has indeed shown himself a workman in it, that he has wheedled mankind into strange, unnatural notions of things, in order to propagate and support the fighting principle in the world; such as laws of war, fair fighting, behaving like men of honor, fighting at the last drop; and the like, by which killing and murdering is understood to be justifiable. Virtue, and a true greatness in spirit, is rated now by rules which God never appointed; and the standard of honor is quite different from that of reason, and of nature. Bravery is denominated not from a fearless undaunted spirit in the just defence of life and liberty, but from a daring defiance of God and man, fighting, killing, and treading under foot his fellow-creatures, at the ordinary command of the officer, whether it be right or wrong, and whether it be in a just defence of life, and our country’s life, that is, liberty, or whether it be for the support of injury and oppression.

A prudent avoiding causeless quarrels is called cowardice, and to take an affront, baseness and meanness of spirit; to refuse fighting, and putting life at a cast on the point of a sword, a practice forbid by the laws of God, and of all good government, is yet called cowardice; and a man is bound to die duelling, or live and be laughed at.

But thus has Satan abused the reason of man; and if a man does me the greatest injury in the world, I must do myself justice upon him, by venturing my life upou an even lay with him, and must fight him upon equal hazard, in which the injured person is as often killed as the person offering the injury. But this indeed is the reasoning which the Devil has brought mankind to at this day: but to go back to the subject, namely, the Devil bringing the nations to fall out, and to quarrel for room in the world, and so to fight in order to dispossess one another of their settlements. This began at a time when certainly there were places enough in the world for every one to choose in; and therefore the Devil, not the want of elbow-room, must be the occasion of it; and it is carried on ever since, as apparently, from the same interest, and by the same original.

But we shall meet with this part again very often in the Devil’s story, and as we bring him farther on in the management of mankind: I therefore lay it by for the present, and come to the next steps the Devil took with mankind after the confusion of languages: and this was in the affair of worship. It does not appear yet, that ever the Devil was so bold, as either,

1. To set himself up to be worshipped as a God; or, which was still worse,

2. To persuade man to believe there was no God at all to worship.

Both these are introduced since the deluge, one indeed by the Devil, who soon found means to set himself up for a god in many parts of the world, and holds it to this day; but the last is brought in by the invention of man, in which, it must be confessed, man has out-sinned the Devil; for, to do Satan justice, he never thought it could ever pass upon mankind, or that anything so gross would go down with them; so that, in short, these modern casuists, in the reach of our days, have, I say, out-sinned the Devil.

As then both these are modern inventions, Satan went on gradually; and, being to work upon human nature by stratagem, not by force, it would have been too gross to have set himself up as an object of worship at first; it was to be done step by step: for ex ample:

1. It was sufficient to bring mankind to a neglect of God, to worship him by halves, and give little or no regard to his laws, and so grow loose and immoral, in direct contradiction to his commands; this would not go down with them at first; so the Devil went on gradually.

2. From a negligence in worshipping the true God, he by degrees introduced the worship of false gods: and to introduce this, he began with the sun, moon, and stars, called in the holy text the host of heaven; these had greater majesty upon them, and seemed fitter to command the homage of mankind; so it was not the hardest thing in the world to bring men, when they had once forgotten the true God, to embrace the worship of such gods as those.

3. Having thus debauched their principles in worship, and led them from the true and only object of worship to a false, it was the easier to carry them on; so in a few gradations more he brought them to downright idolatry; and even in that idolatry he proceeded gradually too; for he began with awful names, such as were venerable in the thoughts of men, as Baal or Bel, which, in the Chaldaic and Hebrew, signifies lord or sovereign, or mighty and magnificent; and this was therefore a name ascribed at first to the true God; but afterwards they descended to make images and figures to represent him, and then they were called by the same name, as Baal, Baalim, and afterwards Bel; from which, by an hellish degeneracy, Satan brought mankind to adore every block of their own hewing, and to worshipping stocks, stones, monsters, hobgoblins, and every sordid frightful thing, and at last the Devil himself.

What notions some people may entertain of the forwardness of the first ages of the world to run into idolatry, I do not inquire here; I know they tell us strange things, of its being the product of mere nature, one remove from its primitive state; but I, who pre tend to have so critically inquired into Satan’s history, can assure you, and that from very good authority, that the Devil did not find it so easy a task to obliterate the knowledge of the true God in the minds and consciences of men, as those people suggest.

It is true he carried things a great length under the patriarchal government of the first ages; but still he was sixteen hundred years bringing it to pass: and though we have reason to believe the old world, before the flood, was arrived to a very great height of wickedness; and Ovid very nobly describes it by the war of the Titans against Jupiter; yet we do not read that ever Satan was come to such a length as to bring them to idolatry: indeed we do read of wars carried on among them, whether it was one nation against another, or only personal, we cannot tell: but the world seemed to be swallowed up in a life of wickedness, that is to say, of luxury and lewdness, rapine and violence; and there were giants among them, and men of renown, that is to say, men famed for their mighty valor, great actions of war, we may suppose, and their strength, who personally opposed others. We read of no considerable wars indeed; but it is not to be doubted but there were such wars; or else it is to be understood that they lived (in common) a life somewhat like the brutes, the strong devouring the weak; for the texts say, the whole earth was filled with violence, hunting and tearing one another in pieces, either for dominion, or for wealth; either for ambition, or for avarice, we know not well which.

Thus far the old antediluvian world went; and very wicked they were, there is no doubt of that; but we have reason to believe that was no idolatry; the Devil had not brought them that length yet; perhaps it would soon have followed, but the deluge intervened.

After the deluge, as I have said, he had all his work to do over again, and he went on by the same steps; first he brought them to violence and Avar, then to oppression and tyranny, then to neglect of true worship, then to false worship, and then idolatry by the mere natural consequence of the thing. Who were the first nation or people that fell from the worship of the true God. is something hard to determine; the Devil, who certainly of all God’s creatures is best able to inform us, having left us nothing upon record upon that subject: but we have reason to believe it was thus introduced: