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monkey and the propensities of a monster. In the State and in the Church, in Arts and Sciences, the Devil is the principle of injustice, hypocrisy, ugliness, and ignorance. Goethe has annihilated the ideal poetical grandeur of Milton's Satan; he has stripped Luther's Devil of his vulgar realism; Goethe has driven Satan from an imaginary hell, where he preferred to rule instead of worshipping and serving in heaven, and with the sponge of common sense he wiped the horned monster, drawn by the imagination of dogmatists, from the black board of ignorance. In banishing the Evil Spirit into the dominion of myths, Goethe showed him in his real nature. Darwin displaced man from the exalted pedestal of a special creation, and endeavoured to trace him as the development of cosmical elements. Darwin enabled us to look upon man as the completing link in the great chain of the gradual evolution of the life-giving forces of the Universe, and he rendered thus our position more comprehensible and natural. Goethe, in proving that the Evil Spirit of ancient and Hebrew-Christian times was a mere phantom of an ill-regulated fantasy, taught us to look for the real origin of evil. What was a metaphysical incomprehensibility became an intelligible reality. The Demon can be seen in "Faust" as in a mirror, and in glancing into it we behold our Darwinian progenitor, the animal, face to face. Before the times of Goethe, with very few exceptions, the Evil Spirit was an entity with whom any one might become familiar—in fact, the "spiritus familiaris" of old. The Devil spoke, roared, whispered, could sign contracts. We were able to yield our soul to him; and he could bodily enter our body. The Devil was a corporeal entity. The rack, water, and fire were used to expel him from sorcerers and witches, and to send him into all sorts of unclean animals. Goethe, in unmasking this phantom, introduced him not as something without, but as an element within us. The service rendered to humanity in showing us the true nature of evil is as grand as the service rendered by Mr. Darwin in assigning to man his place in nature, and not above nature. It is curious that those who have most of the incorrigible and immovable animal nature in them should protest with the greatest vehemence and clamour against this theory. They think by asserting their superiority, based on a special creation, to become at once special and superior beings, and prefer this position to trying, through a progressive development in science and knowledge, in virtue and honesty, to prove the existence of the higher faculties with which man has been endowed through his gradual development from the lowest phases of living creatures to the highest. In assuming the Devil to be something absolute and positive, and not something relative and negative, man hoped to be better able to grapple with him. Mephistopheles is nothing personal; he can, like the Creator himself, be only traced in his works. The Devil lurks beneath the venerable broadcloth of an intolerant and ignorant priest; he uses the seducing smiles of a wicked beauty; he stirs the blood of the covetous and grasping; he strides through the gilded halls of ambitious emperors and ministers, who go with "light hearts" to kill thousands of human beings with newly-invented infernal machines; he works havoc in the brains of the vain. The Devil shuffles the cards for the gambler, and destroys our peace whether he makes us win or lose on the turf; he sits joyfully grinning on the tops of bottles and tankards filled with alcoholic drinks; he entices us on Sundays to shut our museums and open our gin-palaces; to neglect the education of the masses; and then prompts us to accuse them with hypocritical respectability of drunkenness and stupidity. It is the Devil who turns us into friends of lapdogs and makes us enemies of the homeless. The Devil is the greatest master in dogmatism; he creates sects who, in the name of love and humility, foster hatred and pride; the Devil encloses men in a magic circle on the barren heath of useless speculation; drives them round and round like blinded horses in a mill, starting from one point, and after miles and miles of travel and fatigue, leading us to the point, sadder but not wiser, from which we set out. The Devil makes us quarrel whether we ought to have schools with or without bigoted religious teachings; he burns incense to stupefy our senses, lights candles to obscure our sight, amuses the masses with buffooneries to prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality, and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. Satan in all his shapes and forms as he rules the world has been described by Goethe as Egotism. Selfishness is his element and real nature. Selfishness not yet realizing the divine, because so entirely humane command—"Do unto others as you wish that they should do unto you." Selfishness is the only essence of evil. Selfishness has divided men into different nations, and fosters in them pride, envy, jealousy, and hatred. Mr. Darwin has shown that one animal preys on the other, that the weaker species has to yield to the stronger. Goethe again has shown us how the Evil Spirit drags us through life's wild scenes and its flat unmeaningness, to seek mere sensual pleasures and to neglect altogether our higher and better nature, which is the outgrowth of our more complicated, more highly developed organization. Were we only to recognise this, our real nature, we should leave less to chance and prejudices; were we to study man from a physiological, psychological, and honestly historical point of view, we should soon eliminate selfishness from among us, and be able to appreciate what is really the essence of evil. The more nearly we approach Darwin's primitive man, the ape, the nearer do we draw to the Mephistopheles who shows us his exact nature with impudent sincerity in Goethe's "Faust."

That which changes our Psyche, that is our intellectual faculty with its airy wings of imagination, its yearnings for truth, into an ugly, submissive, crawling worm, is heartless selfishness. Not without reason is poor guileless Margaret horrified at Mephistopheles. She shudders, hides herself on the bosom of Faust, like a dove under the wings of an eagle, and complains that the Evil Spirit—

... Always wears such mocking grin,
Half cold, half grim,
One sees that nought has interest for him;
'Tis writ on his brow, and can't be mistaken,
No soul in him can love awaken.

When all goes wrong, when religious, social, and political animosities and hatred disturb the peace; when unintelligible controversies on the inherited sin, the origin of evil, justification, and transubstantiation, "grace and free will," the creative and the created, mystic incantations, real and unreal presences, the like but not equal, the affirmative and the negative natures of God and man confuse the finite brains of infinite talkers and repeaters of the same things; when they quarrel about the wickedness of the hen who dared to lay an egg on the Sabbath; when the glaring torch of warfare is kindled by the fire of petty animosities, then the Evil Spirit of egotism celebrates its most glorious festivals.

What can banish this monster, this second and worse part of our nature? To look upon it from a Darwinian point of view. Goethe saves his fallen Faust through useful "occupation," through honest hard work for the benefit of mankind. The more we make ourselves acquainted with evil, the last remnant of our animal nature, in a rational and not mystic dogmatical sense, the less we exalt ourselves as exceptional creatures above nature, the easier it must be for us to dry up the source of superstition and ignorance which serves to nourish this social monster.

Let our relations to each other be based on "mutual love," for God is love, and selfishness as the antagonist of love, and the Devil as the antagonist of God, will both vanish.

Let us strive to vanquish our unnatural social organization by a natural, social, but at the same time, liberal union of all into one common brotherhood, and the roaring lion will be silenced for ever.

Let us purify society of all its social, or rather unsocial, iniquities and falsehoods, of all ingratitude and envy, in striving for an honest regeneration of ourselves, and through ourselves of humanity at large, convincing one another that man has developed by degrees into earth's fairest creature, destined for good and happiness, and not for evil and wretchedness, and there will be an end of the Devil and all his devilries.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The word is found in Isaiah xxxiv. 14. Translated in the Vulgate as "Lamia;" in Luther's translation as "Kobold;" in the English version as "screech-owl;" and in others as "an ugly night-bird."

CHAPTER XXIV. PECULIAR PEOPLE.

In this title, be it distinctly understood, no reference is intended to those anti-Æsculapian persons who, from time to time, sacrifice to Moloch among the Essex marshes. It is not necessary to journey even as far as Plumstead in search of peculiarity, since the most manifold and ever-varying types of it lie at one's very doors. And here, at the outset, without quite endorsing the maxim that genius is always eccentric, let it be confessed that a slight deviation from the beaten track is generally apt to be interesting. When we see the photograph of some distinguished artist, musician, or poet, and find the features very like those of the pork butcher in the next street, or the footman over the way, we are conscious of a feeling of disappointment almost amounting to a personal grievance. Mr. Carlyle and Algernon Swinburne satisfy us. They look as we feel graphic writers and erotic poets ought to look. Not so the literary females who affect the compartment labelled "For ladies only," in the reading room of the British Museum or on the Metropolitan Railway. They are mostly like one's maiden aunts, and savour far less of the authoress than some of the charming girls who studiously avoid their exclusive locale, and evidently use their reading ticket only to cover with an appearance of propriety a most unmistakable flirtation. This they carry on sotto voce with ardent admirers of the male sex, who, though regular frequenters of the reading room, are no more literary than themselves. One might pick out a good many peculiar people from that learned retreat—that poor scholar's club room; but let us rather avoid any such byways of life, and select our peculiars from the broad highway. Hunting there, Diogenes-wise, with one's modest lantern, in search—not of honest—but eccentric individuals.

And first of all, having duly attended to the ladies at the outset, let there be "Place for the Clergy." There is my dear friend the Rev. Gray Kidds, the best fellow breathing, but, from a Diogenes point of view, decidedly eccentric. Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment, and that Gray Kidds was a harmless patient allowed to join the boys in their sports. Gray Kidds was and is literally harmless. He grew up through school and college, innocently avoiding all those evils which proved the ruin of many who were deemed far wiser

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