But there is worse yet to come; for in the next place he adds, that hell having received them, closed upon them; that is to say, took them in, closed or shut its mouth; and, in a word, they were locked in, as it was said in another place; they were locked in, and the key is carried up to heaven and kept there, for we know the angel came down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit; but first, see Mr. Milton.

Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roar'd
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall:

-Hell, at last,

Yawning, receiv'd them whole, and on them clos'd;
Down from the verge of heaven, eternal wrath

Burnt after them

Unquenchable.

This scheme is certainly deficient, if not absurd, and I think is more so than any other he has laid; it is evident, neither Satan or his host of devils are, no, not any of them, yet, even now, confined in the eternal prison, where the Scripture says, he shall be reserved in chains of darkness. They must have mean thoughts of hell, as a prison, a local confinement, that can suppose the Devil able to break jail, knock off his fetters, and come abroad, if he had been once locked in there, as Mr. Milton says he was: now we know that he is abroad again; he presented himself before God, among his neighbours, when Job's case came to be discoursed of; and more than that, it is plain he was a prisoner at large, by his answer to God's question, which was, Whence comest thou? to which he answered, From going to and fro through the earth, &c.; this, I say, is plain, and if it be as certain that hell closed upon them, I demand then, how got he out? and why was there not a proclamation for apprehending him, as there usually is after such rogues as break out of prison?

In short, the true account of the Devil's circumstances, since his fall from heaven, is much more likely to be thus: that he is more of a vagrant than a prisoner; that he is a wanderer in the wild unbounded waste, where he and his legions, like the hordes of Tartary, who, in the wild countries of Karakathay, the deserts of Barkan, Cassan, and Astracan, live up and down where they find proper; so Satan and his innumerable legions rove about, hic et ubique, pitching their camps (being beasts of prey) where they find the most spoil;

WANDERING CONDITION OF THE FALLEN HOST. 345

watching over this world (and all the other worlds, for aught we know, and if there are any such); I say, watching and seeking who they may devour, that is, who they may deceive and delude, and so destroy, for devour they cannot.

Satan being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is continually hovering over this inhabited globe of earth, swelling with the rage of envy at the felicity of his rival, man, and studying all the means possible to injure and ruin him; but extremely limited in power, to his unspeakable mortification; this is his present state, without any fixed abode, place, or space allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.

From his expulsion, I take his first view of horror to be that of looking back towards the heaven which he had lost, and there to see the chasm or opening made up, out at which, as at a breach in the wall of the holy place, he was thrust headlong by the power which expelled him; I say, to see the breach repaired, the mounds built up, the walls garrisoned with millions of angels, and armed with thunders; and, above all, made terrible by that glory from whose presence they were expelled, as is poetically hinted at before.

Upon this sight, it is no wonder (if there was such a place) that they fled till the darkness might cover them, and that they might be out of the view of so hated a sight.

Wherever they found it, you may be sure they pitched their first camp, and began, after many a sour reflection upon what was passed, to consider and think a little upon what

was to come.

If I had as much personal acquaintance with the Devil as would admit it, and could depend upon the truth of what answer he would give me, the first question I would ask him, should be, what measures they resolved on at their first assembly; and the next should be, how they were employed in all that space of time, between their so flying the face of their almighty Conqueror, and the creation of man. As for the length of the time, which, according to the learned, was twenty thousand years, and according to the more learned, not a quarter so much, I would not concern my curiosity much about it; it is most certain, there was a considerable

time between, but of that immediately; first let me inquire what they were doing all that time.

The Devil and his host being thus, I say, cast out of heaven, and not yet confined strictly to hell, it is plain they must be somewhere: Satan and all his legions did not lose their existence, no, nor the existence of devils neither. God was so far from annihilating him, that he still preserved his being: and this, not Mr. Milton only, but God himself has made known to us, having left his history so far upon record; several expressions in Scripture also make it evident, as particularly the story of Job, mentioned before; the like in our Saviour's time, and several others.

If hell did not immediately ingulf them, as Milton suggests, it is certain, I say, that they fled somewhere from the anger of heaven, from the face of the Avenger; and his absence, and their own guilt, wonder not at it, would make hell enough for them wherever they went.

Nor need we fly to the dreams of our astronomers, who take a great deal of pains to fill up the vast spaces of the starry heavens with innumerable habitable worlds, allowing as many solar systems as there are fixed stars, and that not only in the known constellations, but even in galaxy itself; who, to every such system, allow a certain number of planets, and to every one of those planets so many satellites or moons, and all these planets and moons to be worlds; solid, dark, opaque bodies, habitable, and (as they would have us believe) inhabited by the like animals and rational creatures as on this earth; so that they may, at this rate, find room enough for the Devil and all his angels, without making a hell on purpose; nay they may, for aught I know, find a world for every devil in all the Devil's host, and so every one may be a monarch, or master-devil, separately in his own sphere or world, and play the devil there by himself.

And even if this were so, it cannot be denied but that one devil in a place would be enough for a whole systemary world, and be able, if not restrained, to do mischief enough there too, and even to ruin and overthrow the whole body of people contained in it.

But, I say, we need not fly to these shifts, or consult the astronomers in the decision of this point; for, wherever Satan and his defeated host went at their expulsion from heaven, we think we are certain none of all these beautiful worlds,

INFINITY OF VOID INTO WHICH THEY HAD FALLEN. 347

or be they worlds or no, I mean the fixed stars, planets, &c., had then any existence; for the beginning, as the Scripture calls it, was not yet begun.

But to speak a little by the rules of philosophy, that is to say, so as to be understood by others, even when we speak of things we cannot fully understand ourselves: though in the beginning of time all this glorious creation was formed, the earth, the starry heavens, and all the furniture thereof, and there was a time when they were not; yet we cannot say so of the void, or that nameless nowhere, as I called it before, which now appears to be a somewhere, in which these glorious bodies are placed. That immense space which those take up, and which they move in at this time, must be supposed, before they had being, to be placed there: as God himself was, and existed before all being, time, or place, so the heaven of heavens, or the place where the thrones and dominions of his kingdom then existed, inconceivable and ineffable, had an existence before the glorious seraphs, the innumerable company of angels, which attended about the throne of God, existed; these all had a being long before, as the eternal Creator of them all had before them.

Into this void or abyss of nothing, however unmeasurable, infinite, and, even to those spirits themselves, inconceivable, they certainly launched from the bright precipice which they fell from, and shifted as well as they could.

Here, expanding those wings which fear and horror at their defeat furnished them, as I hinted before, they hurried away to the utmost distance possible from the face of God their conqueror, and then most dreaded enemy, formerly their joy and glory.

Be this utmost removed distance where it will, here, certainly, Satan and all his gang of devils, his numberless, though routed armies, retired. Here Milton might, with some good ground, have formed his Pandemonium, and have brought them in, consulting what was next to be done, and whether there was any room left to renew the war, or to carry on the rebellion; but had they been cast immediately into hell, closed up there, the bottomless pit locked upon them, and the key carried up to heaven to be kept there, as Mr. Milton himself in part confesses, and the Scripture affirms; I say, had this been so, the Devil himself could not have been so ignorant as to think of any future steps to be taken,

to retreive his affairs, and therefore a Pandemonium or divan in hell, to consult of it, was ridiculous.

All Mr. Milton's schemes of Satan's future conduct, and all the Scripture expressions about the Devil and his numerous attendants, and of his actings since that time, make it not reasonable to suggest that the devils were confined to their eternal prison, at their expulsion out of heaven; but that they were in a state of liberty to act, though limited in acting; of which I shall also speak in its place.

CHAPTER VII.

OF THE NUMBER OF SATAN'S HOST; HOW THEY CAME FIRST TO KNOW OF THE NEW CREATED WORLDS, NOW IN BEING, AND THEIR MEASURES WITH MANKIND UPON THE DISCOVERY.

SEVERAL things have been suggested to set us a calculating the number of this frightful throng of devils, who, with Satan, the master-devil, was thus cast out of heaven; I cannot say I am so much master of political arithmetic as to cast up the number of the beast, no, nor the number of the beasts or devils who make up this throng. St. Francis, they tell us, or some other saint, they do not say who, asked the Devil once, how strong he was; for St. Francis, you must know, was very familiar with him; the Devil, it seems, did not tell him, but presently raised a great cloud of dust, by the help, I suppose, of a gust of wind, and bid that saint count it; he was, I suppose, a calculator that would be called grave, who, dividing Satan's troops into three lines, cast up the number of the devils of all sorts in each battalia, at ten hundred times a hundred thousand millions of the first line, fifty millions of times as many in the second line, and three hundred thousand times as many as both in the third line.

The impertinence of this account would hardly have given it a place here, only to hint that it has always been the opinion, that Satan's name may well be called a noun of multitude, and that the Devil and his angels are certainly no inconsiderable number. It was a smart repartee that a Venetian nobleman made to a priest, who rallied him upon his refusing to give something to the church, which the priest demanded for the delivering him from purgatory; when the priest asking him if he knew what an innumerable number of devils