Of Spiritual Darkness, from Misinterpretation of Scripture
Besides these sovereign powers, “divine” and “human,” of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely ( Eph. 6:12), that of “the rulers of the darkness of this world”; ( Matt. 12:26), “the kingdom of Satan”; and ( Matt. 9:34), “the principality of Beelzebub over demons,” that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called ( Eph. 2:2), “the prince of the power of the air”; and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world (John 16:11), “the prince of this world”; and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful (who are the “children of the light”), are called the “children of darkness.” For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a “confederacy of deceivers, that to obtain dominion over men in this present world endeavour by dark and erroneous doctrines to extinguish in them the light both of Nature and of the Gospel, and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.”
As men that are utterly deprived from their nativity of the light of the bodily eye have no idea at all of any such light; and no man conceives in his imagination any greater light than he hath at some time or other perceived by his outward senses: so also is it of the light of the Gospel, and of the light of the understanding, that no man can conceive there is any greater degree of it than that which he hath already attained unto. And from hence it comes to pass that men have no other means to acknowledge their own darkness but only by reasoning from the