he unconsciously
felt that the Devil ought to be expelled from our creed, he did not dare
to attempt the reform of humanity by annihilating the mischief-maker: he
could not rob man of his dearest spiritual possession; had he thought of
consigning the Devil to the antediluvian period of our moral and social
formation, he never could have succeeded in his reform. The Devil, in
fact, was his strongest helpmate; he could describe the ritual of the
Romish Church as the work of the Evil Spirit, produced to delude
mankind. The Devil had his Romish prayers, his processions, his worship
of relics, his remission of sins, his confessional, his infernal synods;
he was to Luther an active, rough, and material incarnation of the
roaring lion of the Scriptures in the shape of the Romish Church,
walking about visibly, tangibly, bodily amongst men, devouring all who
believed in the Pope, and who disbelieved in this stupid phantom of a
dogmatically blinded imagination.

The Evolution-theory may be clearly traced in the two next conceptions:
Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles. They differ as strongly as
the periods and the poems in which they appear. Milton's Satan loses the
vulgar flesh and bone, horn and hoof nature--he is an epic character;
whilst Goethe's Devil is an active dramatic entity of modern times.
Milton's representative of evil is a very powerful conception--it is
evil in abstracto; whilst Mephistopheles is evil in concreto--the
intelligible, tangible Devil, evolved by the power of selection from an
antediluvian monster, and transformed through a civilizing process of at
least six thousand years into its present form. Milton's Satan is a
debased intellect who in his boundless ambition is still a supernatural
being. Mephistopheles is the incarnation of our complicated modern
social evils, full of petty tricks and learned quotations; he piously
turns up his eyes, he lies, doubts, calumniates, seduces, philosophizes,
sneers, but all in a polite and highly educated way; he is a scholar, a
divine, a politician, a diplomatist. Satan is capable of wild
enthusiasm, he sometimes remembers his bright sinless past; "from the
lowest deep," he yearns, "once more to lift himself up, in spite of
fate, nearer to his ancient seat;"--he hopes to re-enter heaven, "to
purge off his gloom;" some remnant of heavenly innocence still clings to
him, for, though _fallen_, he is still an _angel_! Mephistopheles in his
real nature is without an