Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| The Evil Spirit Has Marred the Purity of the Soul from the Very Birth.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XXXIX.—The Evil
Spirit Has Marred the Purity of the Soul from the Very
Birth.
All these endowments of the soul which are
bestowed on it at birth are still obscured and depraved by the
malignant being who, in the beginning, regarded them with envious eye,
so that they are never seen in their spontaneous action, nor are they
administered as they ought to be. For to what individual of the human
race will not the evil spirit cleave, ready to entrap their souls from
the very portal of their birth, at which he is invited to be present in
all those superstitious processes which accompany childbearing? Thus it
comes to pass that all men are brought to the birth with idolatry for
the midwife, whilst the very wombs that bear them, still bound with the
fillets that have been wreathed before the idols, declare their
offspring to be consecrated to demons: for in parturition they invoke
the aid of Lucina and Diana; for a whole week a table is spread in
honour of Juno; on the last day the fates of the horoscope1751
are invoked; and then the infant’s
first step on the ground is sacred to the goddess Statina. After this
does any one fail to devote to idolatrous service the entire head of
his son, or to take out a hair, or to shave off the whole with a razor,
or to bind it up for an offering, or seal it for sacred use—in
behalf of the clan, of the ancestry, or for public devotion? On this
principle of early possession it was that Socrates, while yet a boy,
was found by the spirit of the demon. Thus, too, is it that to all
persons their genii are assigned, which is only another name for
demons. Hence in no case (I mean of the heathen, of course) is
there any nativity which is pure of idolatrous superstition. It was
from this circumstance that the apostle said, that when either of
the parents was
sanctified, the children were holy;1752
and this as
much by the prerogative of the (Christian) seed as by the discipline of
the institution (by baptism, and Christian education).
“Else,” says he, “were the children unclean” by
birth:1753
as if he meant us
to understand that the children of believers were designed for
holiness, and thereby for salvation; in order that he might by the
pledge of such a hope give his support to matrimony, which he had
determined to maintain in its integrity. Besides, he had certainly not
forgotten what the Lord had so definitively stated: “Except
a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God;”1754
in other words, he
cannot be holy.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
