Prince of Darkness

“ So much does that prince of darkness, the devil, influence mankind against the Bible in the day time, that it is when all is dark, and our eyes are closed, and the senses dormant, that God’s mysteries are most clearly seen and understood. ”

“ Some even wickedly feigned to be the prince of darkness, when the preconcerted shrieking and howling of the hidden fellows so terrified the trembling young female above, as to render her a helpless maniac for life. ”

“ Thick darkness surrounded them, yet it seemed to the prince as if their path led into still deeper depths. After a long while he thought he saw a glimmer of light, but the light was neither that of the sun nor of the moon. He looked eagerly at it, but found it was only a kind of pale cloud, which was all the light this strange underworld could boast. Earth and water, trees and plants, birds and beasts, each was different from those he had seen before; but what most struck terror into his heart was the absolute stillness that reigned everywhere. ”

“ What deviltry might come to the surface, what thirst for blood and death that could only be slaked in the torture of their captive! Nine-tenths of the world's crime is committed under cover of the night, and it is not without reason that Satan has been called the "Prince of Darkness." ”

“ But he seems also to have been through life a man of nervous, perhaps even of hysterical, temperament, renowned and envied for his power of shedding copious floods of tears; a man who saw visions and dreamed dreams; and, above all, a man who believed himself to be engaged in a perpetual personal encounter with the Prince of Darkness, who was to him as real and familiar a presence as the ealdorman of Mercia or the canonici of Glastonbury. ”

“ Besides the prince of darkness there are hundreds of thousands of inferior devils, which though less bad and abominable than himself, are yet so wicked and horrible that one could hardly look upon them and live. ”

“ Each field has a small flood-gate called a "trunk."
Can we doubt which will conquer in the end? No! Evil can never have the final victory, but the struggle will be long, for the Prince of Darkness uses such subtle emissaries. They come in the guise of angels, as elevators and instructors, taking from them the simple first principles of right and wrong which they had grasped, and substituting the glamour of ambition, the desire to fly, to soar, for the God-given injunction, "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" ”

“ But a Dark Star, speeding unseen through space, known to the ancients, by them called Erlik, after the Prince of Darkness, ruled at the birth of those myriad souls destined to be engulfed in the earthquake of the ages, or flung by it out of the ordered pathway of their lives into strange byways, stranger highways—into deeps and deserts never dreamed of. ”

“ In my young days, more particularly among the sectaries with whom I had been brought most in contact, a belief in the occasional appearance of the Prince of Darkness, and his interference in bodily form with the affairs of men, was widespread and unquestioning. Philosophers in their own quiet chambers may argue learnedly on the absurdity of such things, but in a dim-lit dungeon, cut off from the world, with the grey gloaming creeping down, and one’s own fate hanging in the balance, it becomes a very different matter. ”

“ For Lucifer had, by his foul, sacrilegious doctrine and action, revealed himself to be the Prince of Darkness not the Prince of Light. To our untold and everlasting misery the Prince of Darkness who failed to ensnare the majority of angels did succeed in ensnaring the majority of mankind. ”

“ Foam of the old phantasms still lingers in our mediæval liturgies, and even falls afresh where the daylight is shut out that altar-candles may burn, or for other dark seances are prepared the conditions necessary for whatsoever loves not the light.
What we call the Dark Ages were indeed spiritually a perpetual seance with lights lowered. Nay, human superstition was able to turn the very moon and stars into mere bluish night-tapers, giving just light enough to make the darkness visible in fantastic shapes fluttering around the Prince of Darkness,—or Non-existence in Chief! ”

“ The refining fires of the gold-gatherers sprang up into flames, and then went out; night fell over everything on the earth, and nothing was visible in the sky but the stars of the southern cross.
"It is past midnight," thought the prince, "for the stars of the cross begin to bend."
He raised himself upon his elbow, and tried to pierce the darkness, but could not. At length a slender blue flame darted out, as from ashes in a chafing-dish, and by the light of it he saw the strange pattern of his carpet and the cushions lying about. ”

“ Disturb the prince and banish quiet sleep.
He dreamed that darkness, visible and dense,
Shrouded the heavens and brooded o'er the earth,
Whose rayless, formless, vacant nothingness
Curdled his blood and made his eyeballs ache;
When suddenly from out this empty void
A cloud, shining with golden light, was borne
By gentle winds, loaded with sweet perfumes,
Sweeter than spring-time on this earth can yield. ”

“ Now the prince of darkness, working through his agents, represents God as a revengeful tyrant, declaring that He plunges into hell all those who do not please Him, and causes them ever to feel His wrath; and that while they suffer unutterable anguish, and writhe in the eternal flames, their Creator looks down upon them with satisfaction. ”

“ What the Prince of Darkness saw was the vision of a race: beginning with the words (Gen. i. 3, 4) , ‘God said, Let there be Light; and there was Light; and God saw the Light that it was good; and God divided between the Light and the Darkness;’ ending with Rev. xx. 1, 2, ‘And I saw an angel come down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.’ [115] ”

“ But to return to his person; he is, as I have said, notwithstanding his lost glory, a mighty, a terrible, and an immortal spirit; he is himself called a Prince, the Prince of the Power of the Air, the Prince of darkness, the Prince of Devils, and the like. Some think the Devil is in our company visible or invisible. ”

“ It would have been wiser, Prince, if we had waited to discuss love and the gods till we were safe within the walls of the city, for the end of it is that we have fallen into the hands of king Darkness, and he is the father of many evil things. ”

“ Persons who delight in such unnatural conclusions, must certainly be in love with the greatest absurdities, and must entirely abandon their natural reason before they can be brought to conclude that the Prince of Darkness would assist men in destroying his own power. ”

“ With the solicitations of this "Prince of Darkness" coming, as he often does, in the form of "an angel of light" there concur affections of our nature, called tender and amiable. The whole heart is misled ”

“ Truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are trained, with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him. ”

“ The prince of darkness therefore does not appear, while he rules over these his willing subjects. The conqueror holds his captives so much the safer, because they imagine themselves at liberty. Thus the strong one armed keepeth his house, and his goods are in peace: neither the deist nor nominal Christian suspects he is there ”

“ It has reappeared not as a speculative inquiry into the possibility of a personal embodiment of evil operating mysteriously, but after a wholly spiritual manner, for the propagation of the second death; we are asked to acknowledge that there is a visible and tangible manifestation of the descending hierarchy taking place at the close of a century which has denied that there is any prince of darkness. ”

“ Thus are we certified that, if the creature knew that which will betide him with the coming of death [FN#137] and his severance from that which he enjoyeth of pleasure and delight, he would cast away the world and that which is therein; for we are certified that the next life is better for us and more profitable." Said the Prince, "O sage, thou hast dispelled the darkness that was upon my heart by the light of thy shining lamp and hast directed me into the right road I must tread on the track of Truth and hast given me a lantern whereby I may see." ”

“ That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld—has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood à priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. ”

“ Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain,
Through labor and endurance. This deep world
Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heaven's all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his glory unobscured,
And with the majesty of darkness round
Covers his throne; from whence deep thunders roar
Mustering their rage, and Heaven resembles Hell!
As he our darkness, cannot we his light
Imitate when we please? ”

“ Suddenly a horrible sound sent a chill of terror through him—a gentle noise as of naked flesh touching the waxed floor—and before he could recover from the shock occasioned by the sound, the voices of many men, voices of men groaning or wailing in some hideous ecstasy, broke the stillness, crying—"Father of all sin and crime, Prince of all despair and anguish, come to us, we implore thee!" ”

“ I, throneless, hear the discords of the dark,
And roar of ruin uncreate, than which
Some vast cacophony of dragons, heard
In wasted worlds, were purer melody.
The universe His tyranny constrains
Turns on: in old and consummated gulfs
The stars that wield His judgement wait at hand,
And in new deeps Apocalyptic suns
Prepare His corning: lo, His mighty whim
To rear and mar, goes forth enormously
In nights and constellations! Darkness hears
Enragèd suns that bellow down the deep
God's ravenous and insatiable will ”

“ But, while my soul started within me at the mighty shout, and my eyes gazed with wonder and astonishment on the glory and the power of the great man, darkness fell upon the throne, troubled waters dashed around it, and the vision of night and vastness, the emperor, the kneeling kings, the armies, and the people, were encompassed in the dark waves—swallowed as though they had not been ”

“ A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name
8 Great Gorgon, Prince of darknesse and dead night,
At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight. ”

“ It has been said—perhaps more satirically than seriously—that theology could not get on without its devil. Certain it is that wherever there has been a vivid realization of the Spirit of Light, there, as if by way of antithesis, there has been an equally clear recognition of the Power of Darkness. ”

“ In despairing, motionless silence, she looks at the sinking sun, with no color in her cheeks but that which he casts upon her. The red, warning sun looks awfully back, face to face with her, in the narrowing strip of blue sky between two horizontal bars of thundering clouds, which the lightning is beginning to chain together, that the night may come before its time, and the enchanted princes and their sister may drown in darkness. ”

“ And I have laughed to see a crying babe tug at the shriveling breast
Of its mother, dead and cold.
I have heard the cries and prayers of men go up to a tearless sky,
And fall back upon an earth of ashes;
But, heedless, I have gone on with my work.
'Tis thus, O, Prince, that I have scourged mankind."
And Satan nodded his head.
Pale Pestilence, with stenchful breath, then spoke and said,—
"Great Prince, my brother, Famine, attacks the poor.
[38] He is most terrible against the helpless and the old. ”

“ But the great demon Safed shook his head, saying, 'You will never reach the Emerald Mountain alive, my son. Be guided by me,—forget all that has passed, and begin a new life.'
Still the faithful Prince gave the same answer, 'I have but one life, and that is gone if I lose my dearest Princess! If I must die, let me die seeking her.'
Then the great demon nodded his head approvingly, and said, 'You are a brave lad, and I must do my best for you. Take this yech-cap: whenever you put it on you will become invisible. ”

“ While the deified lord of the empire of darkness with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves below the level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young boys and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and demons humanity may still be measured with the measure of a man—that is, of the angel. ”

“ From the midst of his dominion, that divinity, crowned with a diadem of ebony, and seated on a throne framed out of massive darkness, looks into the infinite abyss beyond, invisible himself to mortal eyes, but made known by the nocturnal thunder which is his weapon. The under world is also the realm to which spirits retire after death. ”

“ We have seen the shadow of this great king pass, through the clouds of sorrow and suffering, into the glory and immortality which still shed their lustre around his memory, after the darkness of nearly a thousand winters has gathered and passed over his grave. Even the gloomy gates of death could not extinguish, in the volumed blackness they enclose, the trailing splendour which accompanied his setting, without leaving behind a summer twilight, over a land where before there was nothing but darkness to mark the departing day. ”

“ The demon of darkness who has so long held with a firm hand, his empire over the finest portions of the New World, has at length received a mortal blow; every day his dying struggles become weaker, and betoken the near approach of that final convulsion which will end only in the silence and powerlessness of death. ”