44. the dead, how PART IV. courts of justice; and to show them that he that had the will to hurt his brother, though the effect Baptism for appear but in reviling, or not at all, shall be cast understood. into hell fire, by the judges, and by the session, which shall be the same, not different, courts at the day of judgment. This considered, what can be drawn from this text, to maintain purgatory, I cannot imagine. The sixth place is Luke xvi. 9: Make ye friends of the unrighteous Mammon; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting tabernacles. This he alleges to prove invocation of saints departed. But the sense is plain, that we should make friends with our riches, of the poor; and thereby obtain their prayers whilst they live. He that giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord. The seventh is Luke xxiii. 42: Lord, remember me, when thou comest into thy kingdom. Therefore, saith he, there is remission of sins after this life. But the consequence is not good. Our Saviour then forgave him; and at his coming again in glory, will remember to raise him again to life eternal. The eighth is Acts ii. 24, where St. Peter saith of Christ, that God had raised him up, and loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible he should be holden of it: which he interprets to be a descent of Christ into purgatory, to loose some souls there from their torments: whereas it is manifest, that it was Christ that was loosed; it was he that could not be holden of death, or the grave; and not the souls in purgatory. But if that which Beza says, in his notes on this place, be well observed, there is none that will not see, that instead of pains, it should be bands; and then there is no further cause to seek for purgatory in this text. CHAPTER XLV. OF DEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER RELICS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES. 45. of demonology. THE impression made on the organs of sight by PART IV. lucid bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from opaque, or refracted in the The original passage through diaphanous bodies, produceth in living creatures, in whom God hath placed such organs, an imagination of the object, from whence the impression proceedeth; which imagination is called sight; and seemeth not to be a mere imagination, but the body itself without us; in the same manner, as when a man violently presseth his eye, there appears to him a light without, and before him, which no man perceiveth but himself; because there is indeed no such thing without him, but only a motion in the interior organs, pressing by resistance outward, that makes him think so. And the motion made by this pressure, continuing after the object which caused it is removed, is that we call imagination and memory; and, in sleep, and sometimes in great distemper of the organs by sickness or violence, a dream; of which things I have already spoken briefly, in the second and third chapters. This nature of sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to natural knowledge; much less by those that consider not things so remote, as that knowledge is, from their present use; it was hard for men to conceive of those images in the fancy and in the sense, otherwise, than of 45. PART IV. things really without us: which some, because they vanish away, they know not whither nor how, will The original have to be absolutely incorporeal, that is to say of demonology. immaterial, or forms without matter; colour and figure, without any coloured or figured body; and that they can put on airy bodies, as a garment, to make them visible when they will to our bodily eyes; and others say, are bodies and living creatures, but made of air, or other more subtle and ethereal matter, which is, then, when they will be seen, condensed. But both of them agree on one general appellation of them, DEMONS. As if the dead of whom they dreamed, were not inhabitants of their own brain, but of the air, or of heaven, or hell; not phantasms, but ghosts; with just as much reason as if one should say, he saw his own ghost in a looking-glass, or the ghosts of the stars in a river; or call the ordinary apparition of the sun, of the quantity of about a foot, the demon, or ghost of that great sun that enlighteneth the whole visible world and by that means have feared them, as things of an unknown, that is, of an unlimited power to do them good or harm; and consequently, given occasion to the governors of the heathen commonwealths to regulate this their fear, by establishing that DEMONOLOGY, (in which the poets, as principal priests of the heathen religion, were specially employed or reverenced,) to the public peace, and to the obedience of subjects necessary thereunto; and to make some of them good demons, and others evil; the one as a spur to the observance, the other as reins to withhold them from violation of the laws. What kind of things they were, to whom they 45. attributed the name of demons, appeareth partly PART IV. in the genealogy of their gods, written by Hesiod, one of the most ancient poets of the Grecians; and What were partly in other histories; of which I have observed of the ancients. some few before, in the twelfth chapter of this dis course. the demons doctrine was spread. How far The Grecians, by their colonies and conquests, How that communicated their language and writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy; and therein, by necessary consequence their demonology, or, as St. Paul calls it, (1 Tim. iv. 1) their doctrines of devils. And by that means the contagion was derived also to the Jews, both of Judea and Alexandria, and other parts, whereinto they were dispersed. But the name of demon they did not, as the Grecians, attribute to spirits both good and evil; but to the evil only: and to the good demons they gave the name of the spirit of God; and esteemed those into whose bodies they received by the Jews. entered to be prophets. In sum, all singularity, if good, they attributed to the spirit of God; and if evil, to some demon, but a κakodáμwr, an evil demon, that is a devil. And therefore, they called demoniacs, that is possessed by the devil, such as we call madmen or lunatics; or such as had the falling sickness, or that spoke any thing which they, for want of understanding, thought absurd. As also of an unclean person in a notorious degree, they used to say he had an unclean spirit; of a dumb man, that he had a dumb devil; and of John the Baptist (Matt. xi. 18), for the singularity of his fasting, that he had a devil; and of our Saviour, because he said, he that keepeth his sayings should not see death in æternum, (John viij. 52), Now we know thou hast a devil; Abraham is dead, and the 45. PART IV. prophets are dead: and again, because he said (John vii. 20), They went about to kill him, the people answered, Thou hast a devil; who goeth about to kill thee? Whereby it is manifest, that the Jews had the same opinions concerning phantasms, namely, that they were not phantasms, that is, idols of the brain, but things real, and independant on the fancy. Why our Which doctrine, if it be not true, why, may some trolled it not. say, did not our Saviour contradict it, and teach the contrary? Nay, why does he use on divers occasions such forms of speech as seem to confirm it? To this I answer, that first, where Christ saith, (Luke xxiv.39) A spirit hath not flesh and bone, though he show that there be spirits, yet he denies not that they are bodies. And where St. Paul says, (1 Cor. xv. 44) we shall rise spiritual bodies, he acknowledgeth the nature of spirits, but that they are bodily spirits; which is not difficult to understand. For air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone, or any other gross body to be discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the devil, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the devil, he meant a disease, as phrensy, or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit, is not the speech improper? Can diseases hear? Or can there be a corporeal spirit in a body of flesh and bone, full already of vital and animal spirits? Are there not, therefore spirits, that neither have bodies, nor are mere imaginations? To the first I answer, that the addressing of our Saviour's command to the madness, or lunacy he pureth, is no more improper than was his rebuking fever, or of the wind and sea; for neither e hear; or than was the command of God, |