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Immense promises had been frequently made no doubt to William the Silent; nor could any public man, in such times, be so pure that an attempt to tamper with him might not be made: but when the personage, thus solicited, was evidently acting in the interests of the tempters, it is not surprising that he should become the object of grave suspicion.
The cool calculations of temptation as certain, and failure as probable, the serious advice not to strike a wife under any circumstances, such words have literally no meaning to most of our own American readers. Our women are educated to self-reliance, and our men are, at least, too busy for the trade of tempters.
But if he ever entertained any idea of attaining to the highest offices in the State and he may well have done so the fact of his having entered the Catholic Church would, in all probability, have proved a bar to his advance. He resisted the tempters; he despised human respect, and he thrust aside ambition.
Sin always deceives, and its baits artfully hide the hook; but the cruel barb is there, below the gay silk and coloured dressing, and it not the false appearance of food which lured the fish is what sticks in the bleeding mouth. The teacher goes on, in verses 15 to 19, to supply the truth which the tempters tried to ignore.
"I feel as if I must know his name," she said. "Madge, help me persuade the Colonel to tell us." She went to him and petted him. "Colonel, you will not refuse me!" Madge looked at him apprehensively, warningly. "An' I reckon you won't refuse me, Colonel." Then, going close to him, she whispered: "Remember, mum's the word!" "Away, you tempters, away!" the Colonel cried, and waved them from him.
Religion is a good thing, my dear, the best thing in the world, and never better than when we are young, and no young people need it more than young girls. There are temptations to all, and to them as often as to any, Susan Posey. And temptations come to them in places where they don't look for them, and from persons they never thought of as tempters.
My tempters, no doubt, understood their business, and at first allowed me to win from them considerable sums of money; till, elated with my success, I began playing for higher stakes, and when I lost them, I grew desperate, and it was then that I began adding the sin of theft to the no less heinous one of gambling.
I know not if this be true yet if I mistake not our human feelings, there is nothing so exalted, or so divine, as a great and brave spirit working out its end through every earthly obstacle and evil; watching through the utter darkness, and steadily defying the phantoms which crowd around it; wrestling with the mighty allurements, and rejecting the fearful voice of that WANT which is the deadliest and surest of human tempters; nursing through all calamity the love of species, and the warmer and closer affections of private ties; sacrificing no duty, resisting all sin; and amidst every horror and every humiliation, feeding the still and bright light of that genius which, like the lamp of the fabulist, though it may waste itself for years amidst the depths of solitude, and the silence of the tomb, shall live and burn immortal and undimmed, when all around it is rottenness and decay!
And so the years glided; and these two persons, subjected to as strong and constant a temptation as can well be conceived, were each other's guardian angels, and not each other's tempters.
Ezra Stillman came from a long line of salt-seasoned tempters of the sea; their virtues had been rugged and their vices equally robust; sin with them had been gaunt, sinewy, unlovely; there was nothing insinuating and soft about the lure of pleasure in that silver-nooned environment.
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