Exaggerated ideas of the devil's dan gerous power prevailed throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, whose deep, melancholy faith and fantastic theory of the universe generated saints natu rally on the one hand and witches and sorcerers as naturally on the other. It was au involuntary exercise of the poetic faculty, through which the thoughts of their own hearts and of their own time became spirits, which they saw around them. Throughout the Middle Ages the devil was an absorbing idea, and the constant familiarity with him often brought with it a penalty of contempt. In the old religious plays a principal part was usually assigned to him, and indeed he principally represented the comic element, as may still be seen in the pastorales of the Basques.
The decadence of belief in the active external power of the devil was mainly due to the indirect effect of the Re formation and the progress of science. To no man was the devil ever more present than to Luther, but neverthe less it was mainly the movement he in augurated that has driven the enemy back into the sphere of the abstract and the ideal. In later generations the sense of the supernatural has steadily de cayed, and with it almost all the ter rors of the devil; but it cannot be said that with it has also disappeared a genuine religious spirit. The Christian
man in the conscious weakness of his struggle against indwelling sin feels that he has no need to conjure up for him self an external suggester of tempta tion—he has devil enough in the treach erous inclinations of his own heart.
Kant (in 1793) defined the devil as the personification of "radical evil." Schleier macher held that symbolic reference to the devil might fitly have a place in Christian discourse, but denied the pos sibility of his real existence, and in this he has been followed by Schenkel, Bieder mann, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, and others. On the other hand the orthodox view is maintained more or less definitely by Liick:. Von Hofmann, Luthardt, Rothe, Julius Miiller, Martensen, and Dorner, who hold that though the doctrine can not be completely constructed, it yet forms part of a consistent whole, and is of importance for the Christian as distinguished from the heathen and Jewish conception of evil, as well as for the Christian life.