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"I am devout; I am a lover of the Scriptures their beauty haunts me; I go to mass its dignity affects me; and I have prayed, as in my youth I wrote verses. It is not a matter of morality, but of temperament. A man may be religious and yet be evil. Satan fell, but he believed and he admired, as the English Milton wisely shows it."
A watery cloud was passing over the face of the moon, which rendered everything dim and indistinct, as we tore away down a grassy slope; the view terminating in a grove of tall trees, situated upon a rising-ground. Beyond the dark outline of the trees, I saw nothing. As we neared the grove, Satan slackened his speed; this I thought he did with a view to crush me against the trunks of the trees.
And when too Satan, the tempter, becomes Satan the accuser, saying in thy heart: "This sickness is the consequence of sin, or sinful infirmity, and thou hast brought thyself into a fearful dilemma; thou canst not hope for salvation as long as thou continuest in any sinful practice, and yet thou canst not abandon thy daily dose of this or that poison without suicide.
He told me that, if I did not offend God, my prayer, even if it was the work of Satan, could do me no harm; that I should be delivered from it. He bade me pray much to God: he himself, and all his penitents, and many others did so earnestly; I, too, with all my might, and as many as I knew to be servants of God, prayed that His Majesty would be pleased to lead me by another way.
These powers are in constant antagonism, and every man takes his place in the army of Christ or in that of Satan. Those opposed to the Lord are rebels who, except they repent, must share the doom of their leader in the place prepared for the devil and his angels; "for He must reign until He hath put all His enemies under His feet."
Every kind of spiritual disinfectant was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh and prayed by the hour; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
Here is a man more powerful than all the kings on earth put together; a man who, like Satan, could wrestle with God Himself; leaning against one of the pillars in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, weighed down by the feelings and thoughts that oppressed him, and absorbed in the thought of a Future, the same thought that had engulfed Melmoth. "He was very happy, was Melmoth!" cried Castanier.
How keen Jesus was in recognizing the suggestor of the thought that found expression through Peter's lips "Get thee behind me, Satan." Self is Satan, condensed into each man's life, though in some he dare not exhibit his coarser traits; and in others he is being constantly conquered by that power of the Spirit of Jesus which comes through absolute, glad surrender to Him.
He had been talking to Hardy and some others on Fusilier Bluff, when the infamous whizz-bang gun that messenger of Satan sent to buffet us shot a shell whose splinters took the Major in the face and lungs. He dropped, saying "Dammit, I'm hit, what," and was now being taken in a dying condition down Gully Ravine to the Field Ambulance. It surprised me what an everyday affair this tragedy seemed.
You could save us, you could save yourself, by taking a kind, rich man for your lawful husband; but you won't." Then Satan, who is always on hand when we are weakest, quoted Scripture to Edith as he had done once before. The words flashed into her mind, "He saved others, himself he cannot save."
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