CARTOON V. ELYMAS THE SORCERER STRUCK BLIND. MILTON, in that noble lyric, the Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, has described, in the most animated strains, the dissolution of the whole hierarchy of pagan deities, whom the personal advent of the TRUE GOD would deprive of their sway over the abused minds of men. The effect of that event, through every province of their usurped empire, he compares to the influence of the sun, at his rising, on the sprites and goblins of superstition assembled at their orgies beneath the shades of night:--- "The flocking shadows pale Troop to the infernal jail, Each fetter'd ghost slips to his several grave; And the yellow-skirted fayes Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-lov’d maze.' The learned poet only sets forth, in the vivid colours of his art, what in the character of a theologian he probably held for facts. If we may receive an opinion on this subject, common in the Christian church down to comparatively recent times, the reluctance and regret with which the various personages of the ancient mythologies are represented, in this fine Ode, as submitting to their banishment "to profoundest hell," was no fiction: "The lonely mountain o'er And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; Edg'd with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn !” The fathers of the church believed, that the fallen angels, taking advantage of that apostacy of mankind, to which they had themselves originally seduced the progenitors of our race, propagated the deception and perpetuated the misery of their victims, by taking possession of sanctuary and shrine of the grove of Baal and the tripod of Apollowhere a priesthood, at once the instruments and the dupes of the "father of lies," honoured him with costly rites; and whence were sent oracles which he inspired, either immediately, or by means of his auxiliaries, the innumerable "spirits accursed," who were under his controul. A natural corollory from this belief was, that those evil spirits did not, without a struggle, resign "their power To be infring'd, their freedom and their being, confirmed and consolidated, as the possession had been, through the increasing religious dimness of almost four thousand years. Hence it is, that some writers account for the extraordinary frequency of demoniacal possessions in the age of the gospel; Satan, because he knew that "his time was short," having extended his empire, to include with the souls also the bodies of men. Such an increased demonstration of Satanic influence, it is thought, may have been permitted by Providence, as a means of manifesting the divine authority of Christ in its defeat. It certainly would appear, from the Acts of the Apostles, that, in those ages, whatever may have been the fact in earlier or later times, the popular |