It was no discredit to anyone to be on speaking terms with Satan in the early days. The best of us could have tipped a hat to him on the street or had him to a wheel meet without loss of social prestige. For Satan was good people before a certain event which is a prologue to human history. He was one of the Princes of Light and moved in the best circles once upon a time, when everybody was well-bred and had a tide, like an Irishman’s ancestors.

Satan was Walking Delegate to the created universe a few thousand years ago. He assumed that dignity soon after a disturbance in heaven, where he undertook to unionize the angels and was thrown out. What happened after his celebrated fall is told in the book of Genesis. He came into the Garden eastward in Eden and found labor progressing there peacefully. The man was tending the trees and truck, and all the beasts of the earth were obedient to him; and the woman did not know too much to be happy. After he had organized things, labor was a penalty and a trial to the human race, and the sweat of the brow had become a badge of punishment.

Satan was not himself condemned to work. Walking delegates never labor. He was simply required to go in and out on his belly from that day, in his capacity as an agitator and promoter of strikes.

It has been whispered to me by a sage who dwells among the hills of Persia and holds the modified sun-worship of the Ghebers, that Satan’s claim to the authorship of evil in the world is in dispute. An investigation is going on in the hill country, whence cometh great help in the solution of world-old riddles. It was started some forty centuries back, more or less, by one Zoroaster, who so Frenchified the religion of that day that the absorbent Hebrews, ever ready to trace the idea of sex in anything, adopted the dual theory of divinity, and were called to order by the first and greatest of their prophets later on. But in the title search of creation conducted by the Persian sages something came to light which abated the pretensions of the Walking Delegate. It was found that what he called his particular dominion was held on no better title than a quit claim, and the Jewish Prophet who set forth the unity of the Final Authority made proclamation of this also, in these words:

“I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”

It may be remarked that the proclamation of the divine herald here cited is not fully acknowledged up to this day, even in the churches that profess his theology. But, seeing that it took a dozen centuries to set aside the idea of a dual divinity, it is not surprising that twenty-five centuries have passed without an absolute clearing of squat claims to universal dominion—for idolatry is of rapid growth, but it decays exceeding slowly, and so reverses the general law of primitive nature.

So it happens that the Walking Delegate of the Garden, who organized the original lock-out, is in chancery for all time defending a pretender’s claim. There is a caveat on the process of disintegration, which is part of creation, antedating his. Near a thousand years before Isaiah proclaimed the divine origin of evil the Levite priests almost discovered the great principle when they set forth the marks and tints whereby the leper’s brand of death might be known. They blindly testified to a marvelous fact that, once fully recognized, ends the theory that death is a penalty. They found the leper’s ominous ulcers uniform and complex. They almost knew that the complexity of destruction is as ingenious as the complexity of life, and the product of as high a creative power.

A sad day it was for the authority of our alienated friend, the Walking Delegate, when the seeds of disease were found and science proclaimed, twenty-five centuries after Isaiah, that the Lord of All created the parasite, which has life, as he created the life the destroyer feeds on.

In the economy of Providence great changes come mostly from unexpected sources. They were not Parsees or Levites who sought the bacteria of disease. They had no direct quarrel with the Father of Lies, but they doomed Satan when they found in their sterilized culture tubes the sign manual of the Creator of Evil. The germ theory, there established, sealed the fate of catastrophe. Henceforth Satan was an intruder. It was not sin that brought death into the world. Death was in the world before sin. The tree of life itself, in the midst of the Garden, was “for the healing of the nations.” The fruit the man and woman were free to eat yielded its life to their hunger; and hunger itself implied disintegration and death.

Not the Walking Delegate who failed to create a lock-out in heaven, but the Creative Intelligence that shaped all things and set life in motion everywhere, is the author of the check that keeps all in balance. He makes peace and creates evil.

Our old friend Satan is an interloper and a fraud. Some day, perhaps, we shall rattle his armor and find no living thing therein—like the terrifying empty casque and breastplates that did duty for a ghost in miser Gaspard’s window.

William McIntosh.