Though this form of insanity still occurs at the present day, cases of it are rare, owing to the fact that wide circles of people have lost all belief in the existence and activity of demons. There was also a corresponding belief in demoniacal possession. ¶ During the early centuries there was a wide and current belief in the existence of demons.
How false, how mischievous, how merciless,Īnd how pernicious their communications!1 Who men deceive in order to enthral them. Men count their baneful influence benign,Īnd as their spiritual guides instal them Must one day fall: till then, their course pursuing,Īnd wholesome laws respond to all who call them. Seems never granted, but upon their pate, Inviolate maintained without transgression īut there are thousands who have risen irate
Thousands there are who have their first estate But the boundaries between true and false science, as between religion and superstition, had not yet been clearly marked out, and so the word magus had already acquired its evil associations of magic and sorcery. Some were learned in astrology and the learning of the East, and the magi of Chaldæa had an honourable reputation. But the temptation to gain and cheat was too powerful, and the majority were nothing else than pretenders, quacks, and charlatans.
A few of the class may have been great men with more or less sincerity, like Apollonius of Tyana, whose biography was put forward in a later generation to compete with the Gospels. Some really tried to fill the place of philosophers and moral teachers others claimed to be prophets and to possess a Divine inspiration. They appeared sometimes as exorcists, healers, wonder-workers sometimes as astrologers or spiritualists. The developments and intermixture of Greek philosophy and Oriental religion had given them most varied characters. The class of “prophets,” “seers,” and “magi,” who answered to this demand had always existed in the East, but now they were especially abundant. But apart from such special ideas, there was, in the decay and exhaustion of the old pagan religions, a greatly increased demand among men for religious teachers, to tell them something of the truth, to heal their diseases of spirit and mind as well as of body, to open up some channel of intercourse with the spiritual world, and, in a word, give them some knowledge of God. The whole East at this time, we are told by the historian Suetonius, was flooded with Messianic expectations, and the expectations produced a harvest of false Christs. In this they only shared a characteristic of their time. The Samaritans, like the Jews, were eagerly looking for the coming of a Messiah. Thus equipped, he had returned to astonish his countrymen.Ģ. He certainly had picked up ideas which were not Samaritan: the occult learning of his time, its black arts, and those endless speculations on the hidden powers of nature, the spiritual emanations from the Godhead, and the like abstruse and profitless subjects, which, under the name of Gnosticism, were, for two centuries after, to be the plague of the Christian Church. Simon, according to Justin Martyr, was born at the Samaritan village of Gitta, now Kuryet Jit, and by another account he is said to have been educated at Alexandria. We may leave, for the present, the legends which gathered round his name, and consider the New Testament incident-the meeting of Simon with St. Although only once mentioned in the New Testament, he had a considerable place in the Christian literature of the first three centuries. Simon of Samaria, Simon Magus as he is generally called, is the central figure of an episode in the Acts which, brief as it is, has attracted men’s attention in almost every age of Christianity. There was a certain man, Simon by name, which beforetime in the city used sorcery, and amazed the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one.-Acts 8:9. G., At the Temple Church (1911), 56.ĭictionary of the Bible, iv. Thorne, H., Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 90. T., The Acts of the Apostles (Expositor’s Bible), i. B., The Acts of the Apostles (1901), 112. Maclaren, A., The Acts of the Apostles (Bible Class Expositions) (1894), 82. M., Footprints of the Apostles as traced by Saint Luke in the Acts, i. S., Turning-Points in the Primitive Church (1910), 62. Hobhouse, W., The Spiritual Standard (1896), 31.
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