<pre style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; text-align: left;"> SHADOWS OF THE GODS
Only that intensest light could cast so black a shadow
athwart the world as the belief in a purely malignant spirit.
To such a conception — love of evil for its own sake — the
Word Devil is limited in this work; Demon is applied
to beings whose harmfulness is not gratuitous, but inci-
dental to their own satisfactions.
Deity and Demon are forms of the same word, and the
latter has simply suffered degradation by the conventional
use of it to designate the less beneficent powers and
qualities, which originally inhered in' every deity, after
they were detached from these and separately personified./
Every bright god had his shadow, so to say ; and under
the influence of Dualism this shadow attained a distinct
existence and personality in the popular imagination.
The principle having once. been established, that what
seemed beneficent and what seemed the reverse must be
ascribed to different powers, it is obvious that the evolu-
tion of demons must be continuous, and their distribution
co-extensive with the ills that flesh is heir to.</pre>
