because Lucifer having been a Babylonish deity, the fall of the Babylonish Empire has been taken as analogous to the fall of Satan from heaven.' Lucifer seems to have lost his character through a figure of speech. The religious system of Persia affords a most striking instance of deities originally adored being degraded into devils. This system records the great conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman, Light and Darkness, the good and evil principles: but another conflict equally violent has been enacted on the great field of Aryan theology, one result of which is that the word "deva," originally signifying "a bright one," and still meaning a deity to Brahmans, is "a devil" to Parsees. On the other hand the "Ahuras" of the Parsees are gods, Ahura-mazdu (Ormuzd) is their supreme god; yet the same word "Asuras" in the Hindu means malignant demons. The bitterness of some theological controversy of a long bygone age, or some internecine war, at a time. when the Iranian and the Aryan had not parted company, perhaps the feud which brought about the separation,-bore its usual fruit: each party, with the virulent implacability which characterizes religious discord, branded its opponents as devil worshippers and now that the din of battle is 1 Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," tit. "Lucifer." Ķ 2 1 hushed, mutual persecution ended, and even the motive cause forgotten, it appears that all the gods of each party, have, by one side or the other, been torn from their celestial thrones, and contemptuously thrust down to Hell to rank as devils. Similar instances might be multiplied, taken from the history of every creed and nation, but the position is sufficiently illustrated by the fact, that Beelzebub, Lucifer, Loki, Set and the Deuce have each in his time sat high among the gods, and as they all must be ranked as ancestors of the modern devil, it may fairly, and indeed literally be said that "Satan has fallen from Heaven." VI. HELL AND ITS MONARCHS. Hell — Hades, the Invisible World-Bit-Hadi-'Aides-Sheol— Assyrian Hades—Allat-Greek Hades and Tartaros-Minos -Egyptian Hall of Two Truths-Plato's Hades-Ovid's Hades-Virgil's Regions-Rabbinical Ideas-Gehenna-Judges in Hades. THE Devil is regarded as the Monarch of Hell, and Hell is conceived with more or less vagueness as a place of retribution "prepared for the devil and his angels." There was a time when the place now called Hell was presided over by the highest, the most moral god which at the time was acknowledged. The god of Hell now is undoubtedly the Devil, Satan. Theologians of the present day do not define what Hell is; they speak of the older descriptions as figurative, and dilate upon its moral horrors and torments, as represented by the physical sufferings and dread gloom recorded by earlier writers. Only the ignorant addressing the ignorant, in solemn 1 Matt. xxv. 41. earnest; or poets appealing to the emotions of the imaginative, in measured rhythm, place before their hearers or their readers the harrowing details of fire and brimstone, darkness and chains, which formed so large a staple of the teaching in medieval times. The purity of Milton's style, and the refinement of his thought, have furnished an exact ideal of the Hell of the later Christian period, before it melted into a mere unsubstantial expression A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace, flamed; yet from those flames Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace That comes to all; but torture without end With ever-burring sulphur unconsumed.1 This Hell has had its pedigree, its earliest ancestor being a product of necessity, the obvious outcome of animistic belief: animistic belief being almost universal, the belief in an invisible world, inhabited by invisible beings, became equally general. The idea was that there are two great co-existing worlds, the visible, material world, and the unseen spiritual world; the earth, the material world in which we live, is specially associated with the state in which men's bodies exist; Hades, the unseen world, is the abode of all the disembodied souls of all past generations: the earth is the abode of one generation of living bodies; Hades that of the souls of all the generations, which, since the world began, have lived their mortal lives and passed away: Hades is therefore necessarily a place of vast extent and great importance, and any Being believed to be invested with the sovereignty of that unseen world, has had a realm which could not be considered as less important, than that over the one, short-lived, passing generation of mortal men. Where the immortality of the soul, and its non-return to a material existence, were received as dogmas, the God of the unseen world became supereminently great. 66 The primary meaning of the word Hades is simply Invisible" ::-men died, their souls quitted their bodies, and became invisible, they had entered invisibility, Hades; but terms such as these oft repeated, and having a defined meaning, soon become materialized ideas are like the Rabbinical demons,' always seeking for bodies to inhabit, and not long remaining disembodied; and in the present case, the expression invisible had a fabric appropriated for it, not only a name but also a local habitation, which in course of time became very real and definite indeed. 1 See p. 53. |