Paul warned his disciples of night
and the works of darkness. Though they lived in the country, they
did not rejoice in God's heaven, or in the moon and stars which he
had ordained. They fancied that the night was the time in which all
ghastly and ugly phantoms began to move; that it was peopled with
ghosts, skeletons, demons, witches, who held revels on the hill-tops,
or stole into houses to suck the life out of sleeping men. The cry
of the wild fowl, and the howling of the wind, were to them the yells
of evil spirits. They dared not pass a graveyard by night for fear
of seeing things of which we will not talk. They fancied that the
forests, the fens, the caves, were full of spiteful and ugly spirits,
who tempted men to danger and to death; and when they prayed to be
delivered from the perils and dangers of the night, they prayed not
only against those real dangers of fire, of robbers, of sudden
sickness, and so forth, against which we all must pray, but against a
thousand horrible creatures which the good God never created, but
which their own fancy had invented.
Now in the Bible, from beginning to end, you will find no teaching of
this kind. That there are angels, and that there are also evil
spirits, the Bible says distinctly; and that they can sometimes
appear to men.
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