9. With regard to our Lord's reply to the seventy, it will not be urged that it was intended of a local fall of Satan from heaven, unless it may be supposed to allude to his primeval expulsion ; but this sense is scarcely relevant to the occasion. If, then, the literal sense be necessarily departed from, a choice must be made out of the various figurative interpretations of which the words ad mit ; and taking the word Satan here in its gene ric sense, of whatever is inimical or opposed to the Gospel, Jesus may be understood to say, I foresaw the glorious results of your mission in the triumphs which would attend it over the most formidable obstacles. Heaven is often used in the sense of political horizon (Is. xiv. 13 ; Matt. xxiv. 29). To be cast from heaven to hell is a phrase for total downfall (Luke x. 15 ; Rev. xii. 7-9). Cicero says to Mark Antony, You have hurled your col leagues down from heaven. Satan is here used tropically. Our Lord does not, therefore, assert the real operation of demons.
1o. In the refutation of the charge that he cast out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the (le mons, he simply argues with the Pharisees upon their own principles, and ' judges them out of their own mouth,' without assuming the /rude of those principles.
II. The facts he seems to assert respecting the wandering of demons through dry places (Matt. xii. 43), were already admitted in the popular creed of the Jews. They believed that demons wandered in desolate places (Baruch iv. 35). Upon these ideas he founds a parable or simili tude, without involving an opinion of their accu racy, to describe ' the end of this generation.' The observations respecting prayer and fasting seem to have relation to that faith in God which he exhorts his apostles to obtain. Prayer and fasting would serve to enable them to perceive the divine suggestion which accompanied every miracle, and which the apostles had not perceived upon this occasion, though given them, because their animal nature had not been sufficiently sub dued.
12. The application of-the term Satan to the case of the woman who had a spirit of infirmity, is plainly an argumentune ad hontinem. It is in
tended to heighten the antithesis between the /co• ing of an ox from his stall, and loosing the daugh ter of Abraham whom Satan, as they believed, had bound eighteen years.
13. The objection taken from the supposed consequence of explaining the casting out of de mons to signify no more than the cure of. diseases, that it tends to lower the dignity of the Saviour's miracles, depends upon the reader's complexion of mind, our prior knowledge of the relative dignity of miracles, and some other things, perhaps, of which we are not competent judges.
It remains to be observed, that the theory of demoniacal possessions is opposed to the known and express doctrines of Christ and his Apostles. They teach us that the spirits of the dead enter a state corresponding to their character, no more to return to this world (Luke xvi. 22, etc.; xxiii. 43 ; 2 Cor. v. r ; Phil. i. 21). With regard to the fallen angels, the representations of their con-1 linement are totally opposed to the notion of their wandering about the world and tormenting its in habitants (2 Pet. ii. 4 ; Jude, ver. 6). If it be said that Jesus did not correct the popular opinion, still he nowhere denies that the phenomena in question arose from diseases only. He took no side ; it was not his province. It was not neces sary to attack the misconception in a formal man ner ; it would be supplanted whenever his doc trine respecting the state of the dead was embraced. To have done so would have engaged our Lord in prolix arguments with a people in whom the notion was so deeply rooted, and have led him away too much from the purposes of his ministry. ' It was one of the many things he had to say, but they could not then bear them.' It is finally urged that the antidemoniacal theory does not detract from the divine authority of the Saviour, the reality of his miracles, or the integrity of the historians. Sub judice lis est. (Jahn's Biblisches Archliologie ; Winer's Biblisches Realworterbuck, art. Besessene ;' Moses Stuart's Sketches of An gelology in Bibliotheca Sacra, London and New York, r843).*—J. F. D. [ExoRcism..]