earth for the power of hell. The Gnostics of the second century held the doctrine of two principles, from which proceeded all things; one a wise and benevolent Deity; and the other, a principle essentially evil. Elxai and Saturninus propagated these doctrines in Syria, and in the Greek language, and instituted an order whose tenets utterly degraded the religion of Christ. Valentine of Egypt formed them into a system, and evoked out of it, by some fanciful angelic marriages, a Superior Power, called Demiurgus, from whose forming hand our globe and our race issued, and to whom men were enslaved by their evil passions. Christ came to this world to redeem it from Demiurgus, and the contest was to rage until Demiurgus was dethroned.
But another Gnostic branch held that the serpent by which our first parents were deceived was either Christ himself or Sophia, the perfect wisdom concealed under the serpent's form; and serpents became with them objects of Christian worship! The sophistry of Greece was thus renewed; the distinctions between good and evil wore brushed away, and an admirable hint given to the nineteenth-century lawyer, Bailey, of the Inner Temple, for his Festus, in which he beatifies the Gnostic vision, and makes the Deity and the devil to be one!
In the dark ages the devil assimilated himself to the gross imagination of the ignorant, and walked forth in all the material deformity of hoof, horns, claws, and tail. The medium by which he was exhibited was the theologic drama called the Mysteries. The pilgrims from the Holy Land were the actors. In later times, and even up to the Reformation, a higher form of these mysteries obtained, and greater attention was given to their composition. In these plays the devil was a favorite, for he always raised the laugh. This theologic stage usually consisted of three platforms, and the devil had the lowest, the angels the next, and God the highest. On one side of the lower platform was a yawning cave, from which the devil ascended to delight and instruct the spectators. Never a king or a baron gave to his subjects or retainers a gala where this rude representation was omitted. Indeed, the devil became so common that men ceased to regard him as other than a jolly good fellow; and the
