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What, then, is the difference between good and evil demons? For the
Platonist Apuleius, in a treatise on this whole subject, while he
says a great deal about their aerial bodies, has not a word to say of
the spiritual virtues with which, if they were good, they must have
been endowed. Not a word has he said, then, of that which could give
them happiness; but proof of their misery he has given, acknowledging
that their mind, by which they rank as reasonable beings, is not only
not imbued and fortified with Virtue so as to resist all unreasonable
passions, but that it is somehow agitated with tempestuous emotions,
and is thus on a level with the mind of foolish men. His own words
are: "It is this class of demons the poets refer to, when, without
serious error, they feign that the gods hate and love individuals among
men, prospering and ennobling some, and opposing and distressing
others. Therefore pity, indignation, grief, joy, every human
emotion is experienced by the demons, with the same mental
disturbance, and the same tide of feeling and thought. These turmoils
and tempests banish them far from the tranquility of the Celestial
gods." Can there be any doubt that in these words it is not some
inferior part of their spiritual nature, but the very mind by which the
demons hold their rank as rational beings, which he says is tossed with
passion like a stormy sea? They cannot, then, be compared even to
wise men, who with undisturbed. mind resist these perturbations to
which they are exposed in this life, and from which human infirmity is
never exempt, and who do not yield themselves to approve of or
perpetrate anything which might deflect them from the path of wisdom and
law of rectitude. They resemble in character, though not in bodily
appearance, wicked and foolish men. I might indeed say they are
worse, inasmuch as they have grown old in iniquity, and incorrigible
by punishment. Their mind, as Apuleius says, is a sea tossed with
tempest, having no rallying point of truth or virtue in their soul from
which they can resist their turbulent and depraved emotions.
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