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The writing-master, therefore, had a fair field. He flattered the poor young girl by his attentions and praised her beauty. Her moral training had not fitted her to withstand this seductive influence; no mother's love, with its quick, instinctive sense of danger threatening its object, interposed between her and the tempter.
Spoken words are but breath, and who can report all that passed between the tempter and the tempted? Or who can be sure that the craftiness of the guest was greater than the cunning of the host? The nebulous emanations of Burr's mind were rounding into a definite world of purpose. He invoked the aid of the Hon. John Smith to set the new planet revolving.
It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals; but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex, who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity. A few of these, among whom we may reckon the learned Origen, judged it the most prudent to disarm the tempter.
On earth and ocean, the spirit of the Night brooded in a deep and awful calm. Her head drooped low on her bosom, and all the view waned before her eyes with the waning moon. She saw no sea, no sky. Death, the Tempter, was busy at her heart. Death, the Tempter, pointed homeward, to the grave of her dead parents in Combe-Raven churchyard. "Nineteen last birthday," she thought. "Only nineteen!"
He was good-looking of a dark, saturnine beauty, insidiously impressive, like the dangerous charms of a tempter; she was radiant and lustrous with the sweet graces of modesty, innocence, and intelligence. Julia, however, young and susceptible, was for a time pleased with his attentions.
Such phrases as these, "have pity;" "have mercy," were frequently intermingled with groans, and accompanied with weeping. Sometimes he seemed to be holding conferences with some one who was making him considerable offers on condition of his performing some dangerous service. What he said in his own person, and in answer to his imaginary tempter, testified the utmost reluctance.
The curse pronounced on the serpent takes its habit and form as an emblem of the degradation of the personal tempter, and of the perennial antagonism between him and mankind, while even at that first hour of sin and retribution a gleam of hope, like the stray beam that steals through a gap in a thundercloud, promises that the conquered shall one day be the conqueror, and that the woman's seed, though wounded in the struggle, shall one day crush the poison- bearing, flat head in the dust, and end forever his power to harm.
Then the deepest deep of all seemed to be reached when he rose or rather fell from the condition of tempted to that of tempter, and, somehow, managed for a time to lead even the far stronger-minded Ralph Ritson on the road to ruin. But he did not lead him long.
The enemy himself, the alien creature, lies in his own camp, and in a speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place and learn to think of him charitably; but his spirit in our own souls is like a private tempter, a treasonable voice weakening our allegiance to our own duty.
He had evidently been Bert's tempter, and Bert ought, perhaps, to be forbidden to have any more to do with him than he could possibly help. On the other hand, if Bert were to be interdicted from the companionship of his schoolmates, how would he ever learn to take care of himself among other dangerous associations? This was a lesson he must learn some day. Should he not begin now? So Mr.
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