Isaac Newton, Dr. Halley, Mr. Whiston, and the rest of our men of science, we take it to be.
But suppose the passage to he nine days, according to Mr. Milton, what followed? Why, hell gaped wide, opened its frightful mouth, and received them all at once; millions and thousands of millions as they were, it received them all at a gulp, as we call it; they had no difficulty to go in, no, none at all.
“Facilis descensus Averni:
Sed revocare gradum
Hoc opus, hie labor est.” — Virg.
All this, as poetical, we may receive, but not at all as historical; for then come difficulties insuperable in our way; some of which may be as follow: 1. Hell is here supposed to be a place; nay, a place created for the punishment of angels and men, and likewise created long before those had fallen, or these had being: this makes me say, Mr. Milton was a good poet, but a bad historian: Tophet was prepared of old, indeed; but it was for the king, that is to say, it was prepared for those whose lot it should be to come thither; but this does not at all suppose it was prepared before it was resolved whether there should be subjects for it, or no; else we must suppose both men and angels were made by the glorious and upright Maker of all things, on purpose for destruction, which would be incongruous and absurd.
But there is worse yet to come: in the next place he adds, that hell having received them, closed upon them; that is to say, took them in, closed or shut its mouth; and in a word, they were locked in, as it was said in another place, they were locked in, and the key is carried up to heaven, and kept there; for we know the angel came down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit; but first, see Mr. Milton:
“Nine days they fell: confounded chaos roared,
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall:
Hell at last
Yawning received them whole, and on them closed;
Down from the verge of heaven, eternal wrath
Burnt after them Unquenchable.”
This scheme is certainly deficient, if not absurd; and I think is more so than any other he has laid: it is evident, neither Satan, or his host of devils, are, no not any of them, yet, even now, confined in the eternal prison, where, the scripture says, he shall be reserved in chains of darkness. They must have mean thoughts of hell, as a prison, a local confinement, that can suppose the Devil able to break gaol, knock off his fetters, and come abroad, if he had been once locked in there, as Mr. Milton says he was: now we know, that he is abroad again; he presented himself before God, among his neighbors, when Job’s case came to be discoursed of; and, more than that, it is plain he was a prisoner at large, by his answer to God’s question, which was, Whence comest thou? to which he answered, From going to and fro through the earth, &c. This, I say, is plain; and if it be as certain, that hell closed upon them, I demand then, how got he out? And why was there not a proclamation for apprehending him, as there usually is, after such rogues as break prison?
In short, the true account of the Devil’s circumstances, since his fall from heaven, is much more likely to be thus: That he is more of a vagrant than a prisoner; that he is a wanderer in the wild unbounded waste, where he and his legions, like the hordes of Tartary, who, in the wild countries of Karakathay, the deserts of Barkan, Kassan, and Astracan, live up and down where they find proper; so Satan and his innumerable legions rove about hie et ubique, pitching their camps (being beasts of prey) where they find the most spoil; watching over this world (and all the other worlds, for aught we know, and if there are any such;) I say watching and seeking whom they may devour, that is, whom they may deceive and delude, and so destroy, for devour they cannot.
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste of air; yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is continually hovering over this inhabited globe of earth; swelling with the rage of envy at the felicity of his rival man; and studying all the means possible to injure and ruin him; but extremely limited in power, to his unspeakable mortification: this is his present state, without any fixed abode, place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.
From his expulsion, I take his first view of horror to be that of looking back towards the heaven which he had lost; there to see the chasm or opening made up, out at which, as at a breach in the wall of the holy place, he was thrust headlong by the power which expelled him; I say, to see the breach repaired, the mounds built up, the walls garrisoned with millions of angels, and armed with thunders; and above all, made terrible by that glory from whose presence they were expelled, as is poetically hinted at before.
Upon this sight, it is no wonder (if there was such a place) that they fled till the darkness might cover them, and that they might be out of the view of so hated a sight.
Wherever they found it, you may be sure they pitched their first camp; and began, after many a sour reflection upon what was passed, to consider arid think a little upon what was to come.
If I had as much personal acquaintance with the Devil, as would admit it, and could depend upon the truth of what answer he would give me, the first question I would ask him, should be, what measures they resolved on at their first assembly? And the next should be, how they were employed in all that space of time, between their so flying the face of their almighty Conqueror, and the creation of man? As for the length of the time, which, according to the learned, was twenty thousand years, and, according to the more learned, not half a quarter so much, I would not concern my curiosity much about it; it is most certain, there was a considerable time between; but of that immediately: first let me inquire what they were doing all that time.
The Devil and his host being thus, I say, cast out of heaven, and not yet confined strictly to hell, it is plain they must be somewhere; Satan and all his legions did not lose their existence, no, nor the existence of devils neither; God was so far from annihilating him, that he still preserved his being; and this not Mr. Milton only, but God himself, has made known to us, having left his history so far upon record: several expressions in scripture also make it evident, as particularly the story of Job, mentioned before; the like in our Saviour’s time, and several others.
If hell did not immediately engulf them, as Milton suggests, it is certain, I say, that they fled somewhere, from the anger of Heaven, from the face of the Avenger; and his absence, and their own guilt, wonder not at it, would make hell enough for them, wherever they went.
Nor need we fly to the dreams of our astronomers, who took a great deal of pains to fill up the vast spaces of the starry heavens with innumerable habitable worlds: allowing as many solar systems as there are fixed stars, and that not only in the known constellations, but even in the galaxy itself; who to every such system allow a certain number of planets, and to every one of those planets so many satellites or moons, and all these planets or moons to be worlds; solid, dark, opaque bodies, habitable, and (as they would have us believe) inhabited by the like animals and rational creatures as on this earth; so that they may, at this rate, find room enough for the Devil and all his angels, without making an hell on purpose; nay, they may, for aught I know, find a world for every devil in all the Devil’s host; and so every one may be a monarch or master-devil, separately in his own sphere or world, and play the devil there by himself.
And even if this were so, it cannot be denied but that one devil in a place would be enough for a whole systemary world, and be able, if not restrained, to do mischief enough there too, and even to ruin and overthrow the whole body of people contained in it,
But, I say, we need not fly to these shifts, or consult the astronomers in the
