Professor C. C. Everett of Harvard University in a recent article published in The New World, of Boston, bearing the euphonious title of "The Devil," after tracing his history from the early superstitions of the race down through the varying stages of human conceptions, makes certain deductions which are not uninteresting from the Christian Science standpoint. The following is extracted therefrom:—
"The fact that the devil was gradually evolved has been generally overlooked. This oversight has introduced a singular confusion into the later thought of him. It has been assumed that the various characteristics that he possessed at different times belonged to him permanently and collectively. Thus the most contradictory functions have been ascribed to him. . . . The devil seems to fancy that if he will imitate in any way the divine methods he will share the divine omnipotence. The ape that turns over the leaves of a book as it has seen a man turn them hardly realizes, we may suppose, that it is not doing what the man did. The devil of superstition had his sabbaths, and his convocations at which he received the homage of his followers. So sin strives to imitate or to use the methods and the machinery of righteousness. The kingdom of the devil is simply an inverted kingdom of God, in which selfishness is the uniting power instead of love, and to the upholders of the kingdom this seems to furnish the strongest bond of union. This stupidity of the devil, this shrewdness, so sharp that it defeats itself, this sight that is without insight, this assumption of omnipotence by one who is a vanishing element in God's universe, may be associated with an inner contradiction that underlies the entire notion of the devil. He seems to be something, yet he is really nothing. The most profound theologians have insisted that sin is a lack rather than a presence. . . . Sin, then, is negative and not positive. This is well illustrated by the fact that originally the devil was the incarnation of darkness, while darkness is only the absence of light. . . . When we consider that Goethe recognized fully this aspect of the devil, the personality of Mephistopheles, the incarnation of a negation, is seen to be one of the most marvelous creations of genius. Of course this inner recognition must at last become recognized. A mere negation cannot exist. Thus the devil has always carried within himself the elements of his own destruction."
Among his other deductions we find the following:—
"Sins in general are simply concrete. They are the yielding to this passion, the failing to yield to that impulse. So soon as their common element of sinfulness is abstracted, is put over against the separate acts and embodied in a real person, then the idea of sin, as such, is aroused as it could not be tinder other circumstances. See, for example, how different our thought of the world is since we have reached the idea of matter which is simply the abstraction of all objectivity. The world has thereby become mechanical as it never was before. Spirit being recognized as the element of life, we speak of matter as dead. As the abstraction of matter brings to consciousness the material aspect of the world, so the abstraction of sin, in the form of the devil, brings to consciousness the sinfulness of the world."
