the Devil has at any time taken upon him; and whether he can really appear in a body which might be handled and seen, and yet so as to know it to have been the Devil at the time of his appearing; but this also I defer, as not of weight in the present inquiry.
We have divers accounts of witches conversing with the Devil; the Devil in a real body, with all the appearance of a body of a man or woman appearing to them; also of having a familiar, as they call it, an incubus or little devil, which sucks their bodies, runs away with them into the air, and the like: much of this is said, but much more than it is easy to prove; and we ought to give but a just proportion of credit to those things. I As to his borrowed shapes, and his subtle transformings, that we have such open testimony of, that there is no room for any question about it; and when I come to that part, I shall be obliged rather to give an history of the fact, than enter into any dissertation upon the nature and reason of it.
I do not find in any author whom we can call creditable, that even in those countries where the dominion of Satan is more particularly established, and where they may be said to worship him in a more particular manner, as a Devil; which some tell us the Indians in America did, who worshipped the Devil, that he might not hurt them; yet, I say, I do not find, that even there the Devil appeared to them in any particular constant shape or personality peculiar to himself.
Scripture and history, therefore, giving us no light into that part of the question, I conclude, and lay it down, not as my opinion only, but as what all ages seem to concur in, that the Devil has no particular body; that he is a spirit; and that though he may, Proteus like, assume the appearance of either man or beast, yet it must be some borrowed shape, some assumed figure; and that he has no visible body of his own.
I thought it needful to discuss this as a preliminary, and that the next discourse might go upon a certainty in this grand point; namely, that the Devil, however lie may for his particular occasions put himself into a great many shapes, and clothe himself, perhaps, with what appearances he pleases, yet that he is himself still a mere spirit, that he retains the seraphic nature, is not visible by our eyes, which are human and organic, neither can he act with the ordinary powers, or in the ordinary manner, as bodies do; and therefore, when he has thought fit to descend to the meannesses of disturbing and frightening children and old women, by noises and knockings, dislocating the chairs and stools, breaking windows, and such like little ambulatory things, which would seem to be below the dignity of his character, and which, in particular, are. ordinarily performed by organic powers; yet even then he has thought fit not to be seen, and rather to make the poor people believe he had a real shape and body, with hands to act, mouth to speak, and the like, than to give proof of it in common to the whole world, by showing himself, and acting, visibly and openly, as a body usually and ordinarily does.
Nor is it any disadvantage to the Devil, that his seraphic nature is not confined or imprisoned in a body or shape, suppose that shape to be what monstrous thing we would; for this would, indeed, confine his actings within the narrow sphere of the organ or body to which he was limited; and though you were to suppose the body to have wings for a velocity of motion equal to spirit, yet if it had not a power of in visibility too, and a capacity of conveying itself, undiscovered, into all the secret recesses of mankind, and the same secret art or capacity of insinuation, suggestion, accusation, &c. by which his wicked designs are now propagated, and all his other devices assisted, by which he deludes and betrays mankind; I say, he would be no more a Devil, that is, a destroyer, no more a deceiver, and no more a Satan, that is, a dangerous arch-enemy to the souls of men: nor would it be any difficulty to mankind to shun and avoid him, as I shall make plain in the other part of his history.
Had the Devil from the beginning been embodied, as he could not have been invisible to us, whose souls equally seraphic are only prescribed by being embodied and encased in flesh and blood as we are; so he would have been no more a Devil to any body but himself: the imprisonment in a body, had the powers of that body been all that we can conceive to make him formidable to us, would yet have been an hell to him: consider him as a conquered, exasperated rebel, retaining all that fury, and swelling ambition, that hatred of God, and envy at his creatures, which dwells now in his enraged spirit as a Devil; yet suppose him to have been condemned to organic powers, confined to corporeal motion, and restrained as a body must be supposed to restrain a spirit; it must, at the same time, suppose him to be effectually disabled from all the methods he is now allowed to make use of, for exerting his rage and enmity against God, any farther than as he might suppose it to affect his Maker at second hand, by wounding his glory through the sides of his weakest creature, man.
He must, certainly, be thus confined, because body ‘can only act upon body, not upon spirit; no species being empowered to act out of the compass of its own sphere: he might have been empoAvered. indeed, to have acted terrible and even destructive things upon mankind, especially if this body had any powers given it which mankind had riot, by which man would be overmatched, and not be in a condition of self-defence: for example, suppose him to have had wings to have flown in the air; or to be invulnerable; and that no human invention, art or engine, could hurt, ensnare, captivate or restrain him.
But this is to suppose the righteous and wise Creator to have made a creature, and not be able to defend and preserve him; or to have left him defenceless to the mercy of another of his own creatures, whom he had given power to destroy him: this indeed might have occasioned a general idolatry, and made mankind, as the American Indians do to this day, worship the Devil, that he might not hurt them; but it could not have prevented the destruction of mankind, supposing the Devil to have had malice equal to his power; and he must put on a new nature, be compassionate, generous, beneficent, and steadily good, in sparing the rival enemy he was able to destroy, or he must have ruined mankind: in short, he must have ceased to have been a Devil, and must have reassumed his original, angelic, heavenly nature; been filled with the principles of love to, and delight in, the works of his creator, and bent to propagate his glory and interest; or he must have put an end to the race of man, whom it would be in his power to destroy, and oblige his Maker to create a new species, or fortify the old with some kind of defence, which must be invulnerable, and which his fiery darts could not penetrate.
On this occasion, suffer me to make an excursion, from the usual style of this work, and with some solemnity to express my thoughts thus:
How glorious is the wisdom and goodness of the great Creator of the world! in thus restraining these seraphic outcasts from the power of assuming human or organic bodies! which could they do, invigorating them with the supernatural powers, which, as seraphs and angels, they now possess, and might exert, they would be able even to fright mankind from the face of the earth, and to destroy and confound God’s creation; nay, even as they are, were not their power limited, they might destroy the creation itself, reverse and overturn nature, and put the world into a general conflagration: but were those immortal spirits embodied, though they were not permitted to confound nature, they would be able to harass poor, weak and defenceless man out of his wits, and render him perfectly useless, either to his Maker or himself.
But the dragon is chained, the Devil’s power is limited; he has, indeed, a vastly extended empire, being prince of the air, having, at least, the whole atmosphere to range in; and how far that atmosphere is ex tended, is not yet ascertained by the nicest observations; I say at least, because we do not yet know how far he may be allowed to make excursions beyond the atmosphere of this globe into the planetary worlds, and what power he may exercise in all the habitable parts of the solar system; nay, of all the other solar systems, which, for aught we know, may exist in the mighty extent of created space, and of which you may hear farther in its order.
But let his power be what it will there, we are sure it is limited here, and that in two particulars; first, he is limited, as above, from assuming body, or bodily shapes, with substance; and secondly, from exerting seraphic powers, and acting with that supernatural force, which, as an angel, he was certainly vested with before the fall, and which we are not certain is yet taken from him; or, at most, we do not know how much it may or may not be diminished by his degeneracy, and by the blow given
