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| Why We Repudiate Arts of Divination.
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Chapter 23.—Why We Repudiate Arts
of Divination.
35. For in this way it comes to
pass that men who lust after evil things are, by a secret
judgment of God, delivered over to be mocked and
deceived, as the just reward of their evil desires. For they are
deluded and imposed on by the false angels, to whom the lowest part
of the world has been put in subjection by the law of God’s
providence, and in accordance with His most admirable arrangement
of things. And the result of these delusions and deceptions is,
that through these superstitious and baneful modes of divination
many things in the past and future are made known, and turn out
just as they are foretold and in the case of those who practise
superstitious observances, many things turn out agreeably to their
observances, and ensnared by these successes, they become more
eagerly inquisitive, and involve themselves further and further in
a labyrinth of most pernicious error. And to our advantage, the
Word of God is not silent about this species of fornication of the
soul; and it does not warn the soul against following such
practices on the ground that those who profess them speak lies, but
it says, “Even if what they tell you should come to pass, hearken
not unto them.”1806
For though the ghost of the dead
Samuel foretold the truth to King Saul,1807
that does not make such
sacrilegious observances as those by which his ghost was brought up
the less detestable; and though the ventriloquist woman1808
| 1808 Ventriloqua
femina. The woman with a familiar
spirit to whom Saul resorted in his extremity is called in the
Septuagint translation
ἐγγαστρἰμυθος. See
1 Sam. xxviii. 7. | in the
Acts of the Apostles bore true testimony to the apostles of the
Lord, the Apostle Paul did not spare the evil spirit on that
account, but rebuked and cast it out, and so made the woman
clean.1809
36. All arts of this sort,
therefore, are either nullities, or are part of a guilty
superstition, springing out of a baleful fellowship between men and
devils, and are to be utterly repudiated and avoided by the
Christian as the covenants of a false and treacherous friendship.
“Not as if the idol were anything,” says the apostle; “but
because the things which they sacrifice they sacrifice to devils
and not to God; and I would not that ye should have fellowship with
devils.”1810
Now what
the apostle has said about idols and the sacrifices offered in
their honor, that we ought to feel in regard to all fancied signs
which lead either to the worship of idols, or to worshipping
creation or its parts instead of God, or which are connected with
attention to medicinal charms and other observances for these are
not appointed by God as the public means of promoting love towards
God and our neighbor, but they waste the hearts of wretched men in
private and selfish strivings after temporal things. Accordingly,
in regard to all these branches of knowledge, we must fear and shun
the fellowship of demons, who, with the Devil their prince, strive
only to shut and bar the door against our return. As, then, from
the stars which God created and ordained, men have drawn lying
omens of their own fancy, so also from things that are born, or in
any other way come into existence under the government of God’s
providence, if there chance only to be something unusual in the
occurrence,—as when a mule brings forth young, or an object is
struck by lightning,—men have frequently drawn omens by
conjectures of their own, and have committed them to writing, as if
they had drawn them by rule.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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