And he was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake.
Luke xi. 14.
This was a belief of deafness, an error of mortal sense, which our blessed Master cast out. The wrong sense must yield to the right.
The meaning of the term devil needs to be understood. The idea that the Devil is one person is too limited and contradictory. The apostle Paul refers to this personality of evil as "the god of this world," and then defines this god as "dishonesty, craftiness, handling the Word of God deceitfully." In the Bible, the Devil was at first a serpent. Subsequently, the ancients changed the meaning of the term, and the serpent became a symbol of divine wisdom.
