The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-08-17
IS THERE A DEVIL?
The Existence of the Devil Called Un- thinkable by an Episcopal Minister.

thnkable by an Episcopal Minister.
 Five times, five times only, the worG | Satan as a proper name occurs In the
 entire Old Testament; three times ir | the Book of Job, once in l. Chronicles and once in Zachariah But there is a vast difference between the ideas that | the Satan of these books seems to em- body and the idea of the Devil which
 was entertained at a later time and 1 has come down to us.
 i The Satan of the Book of Job, e. g., presses himself before the Lord among ] the sons of God, as one about to be en- | trusted with some commission by the Most High. God asks him: Whence comest thou?" and Satan answers:
 From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in It. There is no hint here, you see, of Satan
 as the exalted and exclusive ruler of a
 kingdom of darkness, Had he borne
 sway over such kingdom. the Lord
 would scarcely have asked the ques-
 ton, "Whence comest thou We
 should judge from this passage that
 Satan had no particular abode, no em-
 pire of which he was lord supreme;
 that he was simply restless. envious
 wanderer on the face of the earth.
 And 1t cannot be ignored that in the
 Book of Job Satan appears as the
 agent of the Almighty; he has only the
 liberty in dealing with Job that God gives him; he does to Job only what
 God wants him to do; he keeps strictly
 within the limits of his agency. It is impossible to read the Book and not admit that every aff1iction laid upon Job by Satan was approved by the Most High. Job, In his bitterness, in his deepest widest most agonized ut terances of protest, never supposes for one moment that Satan Is the author of his woe; his dark problem, the warp and wool of his tragic wonderment Is. always. that he should be afflicted with such misery at the hands of the Most Hisb. Satan as the ultimate author of his suffering never seems to enter his head.
 Vastly different is this conception of Satan in the Book of Job, standing be- fore the Lord among the sons of God, and afterward strictly executing the I ,ord's will from the later idea of the Devil as a prince of some neither realm of darkness, shrinking away from the sons of God, and forever striving, with large success, to execute his own will in opposition to Gods.
 The word, Satan, occurs also, as I have said, in the First Book of Chroni- cles where it is declared that Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israeli But turn back to the Second Book of Samuel and there you will read that it was the Lord who moved David to go and num- Der the people. We can reconcile the two passages only by supposing that if Satan moved David to number the peo- ole, as the Book of Chronicles has it, he lid so by Gods command, acting in the ot an agent ot the Most High, IS he did in his dealings with Job. And so we are still without any reve- ation of the Devil in the Old Testa- l nent
 There still remains the allusion to Sa- ! an in the Book of Zachariah; but surely we should be hard put to it to l ind our modern Devil in this brief and indefinite allusion of a poet in the Ian | ,uage of poetry! zechariah says: l He showed me Joshua, the High | priest, standing before the angel of the l lord, and Satan standing at his right | land to resist him. And the Lord said l into Satan, the Lord rebuke thee, o ,atan, even the Lord that hath chosen erusalem, rebuke thee; is not this rand plucked out of the flre?"