Note 2 — Front matter

Notably out of the poetic opening verses of the sixth chapter of Genesis, which always remained the proof-passage for the demonologic system of the Church. On it had been based that mystical “book of Enoch,” which exercised so striking an influence upon Jewish thought during the centuries just before and just after the Christian era, and indeed upon the writers of the New Testament themselves (Jude, for example, cites it largely and by name), and which was treated by the early Christians as wholly canonical. Hence came the legend of the fall of the angels, so familiar to us through Milton, and a commonplace in the older day. Of even more lasting influence was the demonologic romance of Tobias, or Tobit, which is now classed by Protestants as apocryphal, but which was cited by the earliest Christian writers with the same freedom as any part of the Old Testament, and still retains its place in the Catholic Bible. No book was so largely quoted by the later Christian writers on diabolism and witchcraft. The whole theory of exorcism indeed is mainly based on it; and, still more, the horrible belief in incubi. Of importance also (besides all that could be found in the books of our canon) were the demonologic passages of the apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” and “Ecclesiasticus.” Tertullian cites the latter, like any other book of Scripture, with the solemn “as it is written” (sicut scriptum est). See Diestel, “Geschichte des Alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche”; Reuss, “Geschichte des Alten Testaments”; and Emanuel Deutsch, “The Talmud” (in his “Literary remains”).