The evil principle of Zoroaster was from eternity self-created and
existent, and some of the early Christian sects held the same opinion.
The gospel, however, affords no countenance to this notion of a divided
sovereignty of the universe. The Divine Teacher, it is true, in
discoursing of evil, made use of the language prevalent in His time, and
which was adapted to the gross conceptions of His Jewish bearers; but He
nowhere presents the embodiment of sin as an antagonism to the absolute
power and perfect goodness of God, of whom, and through whom, and to whom
are all things. Pure himself, He can create nothing impure. Evil,
therefore, has no eternity in the past. The fact of its present actual
existence is indeed strongly stated; and it is not given us to understand
the secret of that divine alchemy whereby pain, and sin, and discord
become the means to beneficent ends worthy of the revealed attributes of
the Infinite Parent. Unsolved by human reason or philosophy, the dark
mystery remains to baffle the generations of men; and only to the eye of
humble and childlike faith can it ever be reconciled to the purity,
justice, and mercy of Him who is "light, and in whom is no darkness at
all."

"Do you not believe in the Devil?" some one once asked the Non-conformist
Robinson. "I believe in God," was the reply; "don't you?"

Henry of Nettesheim says "that it is unanimously maintained that devils
do wander up and down in the earth; but what they are, or how they are,
ecclesiasticals have not clearly expounded." Origen, in his Platonic
speculations on this subject, supposed them to be spirits who, by
repentance, might be restored, that in the end all knees might be bowed
to the Father of spirits, and He become all in all. Justin Martyr was of
the opinion that many of them still hoped for their salvation; and the
Cabalists held that this hope of theirs was well founded. One is