Percy Bysshe Shelley

“ He is for ever tortured with compassion and affection for those whom he betrays and ruins; he is racked by a vain abhorrence for the desolation of which he is the instrument; he is like a man compelled by a tyrant to set fire to his own possessions, and to appear as the witness against, and the accuser of his dearest friends and most intimate connexions; and then to be the executioner, and to inflict protracted torments upon them. ”

“ Like panic-stricken slaves in the presence of a jealous and suspicious despot, they have tortured themselves to devise some flattering sophism, by which they might appease him by the most contradictory praises—endeavouring to reconcile omnipotence, and benevolence, and equity, in the author of an universe, where evil and good are inextricably entangled, and where the most admirable tendencies to happiness and preservation are for ever baffled by misery and decay. The Christians, therefore, invented or adopted the Devil to extricate them from this difficulty. ”

“ Milton's Devil, as a moral being, is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in a purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy—not from any mistaken notion of bringing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the open and alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. ”

“ To determine the nature and functions of the Devil, is no contemptible province of the European Mythology. Who, or what he is, his origin, his habitation, his destiny, and his power, are subjects which puzzle the most acute theologians, and on which no orthodox person can be induced to give a decisive opinion. He is the weak place of the popular religion—the vulnerable belly of the crocodile. ”

“ The thing that comes nearest to it is a troop of idle dirty boys baiting a cat; cooks skinning eels, and boiling lobsters alive, and bleeding calves, and whipping pigs to death; naturalists anatomizing dogs alive, (a dog has as good a right and a better excuse for anatomizing a naturalist,) are nothing compared to God and the Devil judging, damning, and then tormenting the soul of a miserable sinner. ”

“ The Manichæan philosophy respecting the origin and government of the world, if not true, is at least an hypothesis conformable to the experience of actual facts. To suppose that the world was created and is now superintended by two spirits of a balanced power and opposite dispositions, is simply a personification of the struggle which we experience within ourselves, and which we perceive in the operations of external things as they affect us, between good and evil. ”

“ The Devil, it is stated, before his fall, was an Angel of the highest rank and the most splendid accomplishments, who placed his peculiar delight in doing good. But the inflexible grandeur of his spirit, mailed and nourished by the consciousness the purest and loftiest designs, was so secure from the assault of any gross or common torments, that God was considerably puzzled to invent what he considered an adequate punishment for his rebellion ”

“ It is in fact a poetical exposition of the matter of fact, before modern science had so greatly enlarged the boundaries of the sensible world, and was, next to pure deism or a personification of all the powers whose agency we know or can conjecture, the religion attended by the fewest evil consequences.
If the sun is Hell the Devil has a magnificent abode, being elevated as it were on the imperial throne of the visible world. If we assign to the Devil the greatest and most glorious habitation within the scope of our senses, where shall we conceive his mightier adversary to reside? ”

“ But the Christians contrived to turn the wrecks of the Greek mythology, as well as the little they understood of their philosophy, to purposes of deformity and falsehood. I suppose the sting with which he was armed gave him a dragon-like and viperous appearance, very formidable.
I can sufficiently understand why the author of evil should have been typified under the image of a serpent; that animal producing merely by its sight so strong an associated recollection of the malignity of many of its species. ”

“ Shall we suppose that the Devil occupies the centre and God the circumference of existence, and that one urges inwards with the centripetal, whilst the other is perpetually struggling outwards from the narrow focus with the centrifugal force, and that from their perpetual conflict results the mixture of good and evil, harmony and discord, beauty and deformity, production and decay, which are the general laws of the moral and material world? ”

“ It is less the opinion of the person himself than that of those by whom he is surrounded, which gives that air of confidence by which the most absurd tenets have been transmitted from generation to generation. A man may, in truth, never have considered whether there is or is not a Devil ”

“ Some have supposed that the Devils live in the Sun, and that that glorious luminary is the actual Hell; perhaps that every fixed star is a distinct Hell appropriated to the use of its several systems of planets, so great a proportion of the inhabitants of which are probably devoted to everlasting damnation, if the belief of one particular creed is essential to their escape, and the testimony of its truth so very far remote and obscure as in the planet which we inhabit. I do not envy the theologians, who first invented this theory. ”

“ It is, in fact, a proof of approaching extinction in any religion, when its teachers and its adherents, instead of proudly and dogmatically insisting upon the most knotty or unintelligible articles of their creed, begin to palliate and explain away the doctrines in which their more believing ancestors had shewn a reverential acquiescence, and an audacious exultation of confidence. ”

“ As a man, were he deprived of all other refuge, he might hold his breath and die—but God is represented as omnipotent and the Devil as eternal. Milton has expressed this view of the subject with the sublimest pathos.
It is commonly said that the Devil has only precisely so much power as is allowed him by God's providence. Christians exhort each other to despise his attacks, and to trust in God. If this trust has ever been deceived, they seem in a poor way, especially when it is considered that God has arranged it so that the Devil should have no inconsiderable portion of the souls of men. ”

“ God, it seems, had some special reason for patronizing Job, and one does not well see why he spared him at last. The expostulations of Job with God are of the most daring character ; it is certain he would not bear them from a Christian. If God were a refined critic, which from his inspiration of Ezechiel would never have been suspected, one might imagine that the profuse and sublime strain of poetry not to be surpassed by anything ancient, much less modern, had found favour with him. But to return to the Devil, the Accuser. ”

“ Milton divested him of a sting, hoof, and horns, and clothed him with the sublime grandeur of a graceful but tremendous spirit.
I am afraid there is much laxity among the orthodox of the present day, respecting a belief in the Devil. I recommend to the Bishops to make a serious charge to their diocesans on this dangerous latitude. The Devil is the outwork of the Christian faith; he is the weakest point. You may observe that infidels, in their novitiate, always begin by tremulously doubting the existence of the Devil. ”

“ If these incalculable millions of suns, planets, satellites, and comets are inhabited, is it to be supposed that God formed their inhabitants better, or less liable to offend him than those primordial spirits, those angels near his throne, those first and most admirable of his creatures, who rebelled and were damned? ”

“ He turned his good into evil, and, by virtue of his omnipotence, inspired him with such an impulse, as, in spite of his better nature, irresistibly determined him to act what he most abhorred, and to be a minister of those designs and schemes of which he was the chief and the original victim. ”

“ But to tempt mankind to incur everlasting damnation, must, on the part of God, and even on the part of the Devil, arise from that disinterested love of tormenting and annoying, which is seldom observed on earth. ”

“ Misery and injustice contrive to produce very poetical effects, because the excellence of poetry consists in its awakening the sympathy of men, which, among persons influenced by an abject and gloomy superstition, is much more easily done by images of horror than of beauty. It often requires a higher degree of skill in a poet to make beauty, virtue, and harmony poetical, that is, to give them an idealized and rhythmical analogy with the predominating emotions of his readers,—than to make injustice, deformity and discord poetical. ”

“ Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the character of the Devil, as expressed in Paradise Lost. He is a Devil, very different from the popular personification of evil, and it is a mistake to suppose that he was intended for an idealism of Evil. Malignity, implacable hate, cunning, and refinement of device to inflict the utmost anguish on an enemy, these, which are venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant ”

“ The account they give us of the origin of the Devil is curious:—Heaven, according to the popular creed, is a certain airy region inhabited by the Supreme Being, and a multitude of inferior Spirits. With respect to the situation of it theologians are not agreed, but it is generally supposed to be placed beyond the remotest constellation of the visible stars. These spirits are supposed, like those which reside in the bodies of animals and men, to have been created by God, with foresight of the consequences which would result from the mechanism of their nature. ”

“ There is little reason to suppose that any considerable multitude of the planets were tenanted by beings better capable of resisting the temptations of the Devil than ours. But is the Devil, like God, omnipresent? ”

“ The Devil and his Angels are called the Powers of the Air, and the Devil himself Lucifer. I cannot discover why he is called Lucifer, except from a misinterpreted passage in Isaiah, where that poet exults over the fall of an Assyrian king, the oppressor of his country:—"How art thou fallen, Lucifer, king of Morning!"—The Devil after having gradually assumed the horns, hoof, tail, and ears of the ancient Gods of the woods, lost them again, although wings had been added. It is inexplicable why men assigned him these additions as circumstances of terror and deformity. ”

“ The Devil has a better excuse, for, as he was entirely made by God, he can have no tendency or disposition, the seeds of which were not originally planted by his Creator; and as everything else was made by God, those seeds can have only developed themselves in the precise degree and manner determined by the impulses arising from the agency of the rest of his creation. It would be as unfair to complain of the Devil for acting ill, as of a watch for going badly ”

“ The writer who would have attributed majesty and beauty to the character of victorious and vindictive omnipotence, must have been contented with the character of a good Christian; he never could have been a great epic poet. ”

“ The dirty work is done by the Devil, in the same manner as some starving wretch will hire himself out to a king or minister, with a stipulation that he shall have some portion of the public spoil, as an instrument to betray a certain number of other starving wretches into circumstances of capital punishment, when they may think it convenient to edify the rest, by hanging up a few of those whose murmurs are too loud. ”

“ One does not well see who is to be damned, and who not according to the fashionable creed.
The sphere of the operations of the Devil is difficult to determine. The late inventions and improvements in telescopes have considerably enlarged the notions of men respecting the bounds of the universe. It is discovered that the Earth is comparatively a small globe, in a system consisting of a multitude of others, which roll round the sun ”

“ The Devils and the damned, without some miraculous interposition would then be the inhabitants of a very agreeable world; and as they probably would have become very good friends from a community of misfortune and the experience which time gives those who live long enough of the folly of quarrelling—would probably administer the affairs of their Colony with great harmony and success. ”

“ If the Devil takes but half the pleasure in tormenting a sinner which God does, who took the trouble to create him, and then to invent a system of casuistry by which he might excuse himself for devoting him to eternal torment, this reward must be considerable. ”

“ As it is, Paradise Lost has conferred on the modern mythology a systematic form; and when the immeasurable and unceasing mutability of time shall have added one more superstition to those which have already arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators and critics will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have participated in the eternity of genius. [2] The Devil owes everything to Milton. ”

“ The supposition that a good spirit is, or hereafter will be, superior, is a personification of the principle of hope, and that thirst for improvement without which present evil would he intolerable. The vulgar are all Manichæans—all that remains of the popular superstition is mere Machinery and accompaniment. ”

“ The fixed stars are supposed to be suns, each of them the centre of a system like ours. Those little whitish specks of light that are seen in a clear night, are discovered to consist of a prodigious multitude of suns, each probably the centre of a system of planets. The system of which our earth is a planet has been discovered to belong to one of those larger systems of suns, which, when seen at a distance, look like a whitish speck of light ”