conflicts with the prince of evil. The footsteps of the saints were dogged by demons. The air was full. Every evil thought was suggested by them. To escape them men left the city and went into the wilderness, only to find the waste. places grinning with persecuting imps. The devil, immeasurably more than Christ, dominated fifteen centuries of Christian history. Theories of the atonement were all founded upon the Satan-idea. The fathers found the problem of the great sacrifice unriddled in that it was intended literally to strike from humanity the satanic grasp. The souls of men had been taken captive in the fall, by the great adversary, and the only way in which they could be redeemed, was for "Jesus to offer himself to the devil as the ransom for which he should release all the others."

If the Satan-idea had stopped here, it would have been bad enough. But it went further. It blossomed into the bloodiest crimes that stain the pages of modern history-crimes committed in the name of Christ. The craze of witchcraft with its persecutions and murders came of it. It put the human bloodhound upon the track of the deformed and unfortunate. It crowded the courts. It lighted the faggots.

Says Mr. Leckey, in his History of Rationalism: "In order that men should believe in witches, their intellects must have been familiarized with

conceptions of satanic power and satanic presence, and they must regard these things with an unfaltering belief. In order that witchcraft should be prominent, the imaginations of men. must have been so forcibly directed to these articles of belief, as to tinge and govern the habitual current of their thoughts and to produce a strong disposition to see Satanic agency around them." "For more than 1500 years, it was universally believed that the Bible established in the clearest manner, the reality of the crime, and that an amount of evidence so varied and so ample as to preclude the very possibility of doubt, attested its continuance and prevalence. The clergy denounced it with all the emphasis of authority; the legislators of almost every land enacted laws for its punishment Acute judges, whose lives were spent in sifting evidence, investigated the question on countless occasions and condemned the accused. Tens of thousands of witches perished by the most agonizing and protracted torments, without exciting the faintest compassion."

The history of the results of this belief in the devil and his angels would be enought to condemn it in every serious mind. A doctrine that has wrought such ravages has no title to respect. Born in savagery, it has perpetutated savage feelings wherever it has been received. It does not

work for righteousness. It blights and hardens. When we are invited to-day to revive the waning belief in the devil and rehabitiate him in his medieval rags as a scarecrow to frighten sinners in times of religious excitement, we say, Let him be finally buried to rot in his sepulcher of infamy and let every stone of execration that the ages have justified be piled upon him.

The rationalistic spirit of the 18th century checked the delusion, and brought back men to the solid ground of common sense. To us to-day, those who would have been thought in other ages possessed of devils, are regarded as insane and placed in hospitals. The sterner operations of nature are no longer the work of demons: "everything is now, in the belief of the most thoughtful men, governed by law. Disease and lunacy are traced to their origin; the storm and earthquake are following some law; our suffering, when we do wrong is the consciousness that we have transgressed some principle of righteousness." We do not burn the aged and deformed and unfortunate as witches and wizards. We care for them. Thus the kingdom of darkness is yelding. Let the demons and their arch-fiend die! It is only when we banish forever these horrible notions that we can fully believe in God and in the coming of that day when "God shall be all and in all.”