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The Scope of Sin.
“Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary,
the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking
whom he may devour’’ (I Peter 5:8).
HE other day I was at West View
cemetery in a carriage with a gentle
man. I noticed he was very quiet as
we drove through. Finally, he said:
“It always gives me the blues to go
through a cemetery. Yet I suppose it
would be better for me if I were to go
through oftener. I am a better man
after facing such sad realities.”
T
I think he was right. We are all better for hav
ing our minds directed to the awful fact of death.
And just so it is with respect to the devil and his
works. We may have ever so much knowledge of
what is going on, yet we shall get good from
being brought face to face with it.
Satan’s Doings.
What is Satan doing? Would you know? Then
open your eyes wide, and take in the world. It
is impossible at a glance; it can only be done by
degrees.
What is Satan doing? Go to the courts, the jails,
and the prisons; see him in his work of destroying
character, defeating justice, wrecking hope, and
blighting fair prospects.
What is Satan doing? Stand on the street cor
ners: see the passing multitudes; hear their idle
talk, and behold their mighty vanity. Go in the
places of business: see the greed for gain and the
unfair means to obtain it.
What is Satan doing? Enter the circle of high
society: see its revelry and witness its hidden shame.
Go through the homes, and get into the secret of
the domestic circle: see the disappointment and
hear the heart throbs of agony.
What is Satan doing? Oh, my God, the question
is too big! We cannot answer it. All we can do is
to point out the directions he is traveling, and pick
up a bit of the fragments left behind.
Certainly, he is never still. Hannibal said of
Marcellus, that he could never be quiet, neither
conquerer or conquered, that when he seemed to
be conquered, he would labor to recover his loss.
Surely, this is true of Satan. If w r e stoutly re
sit t him, he will come again. Every trick and in
trigue, known and unknown, he readily works to
accomplish his purpose in wreck and ruin.
Intrigue and Guile.
There is nothing like his intrigue and guile. Like
the eagle, when he seizes upon a carcass, will first
pick out its eyes and then feed on its flesh, so
Satan’s effort to destroy is to blur the spiritual
perception, and then drag the soul down to hell.
In the beautiful gardens of Hampton Court by
the Thames are many trees well-nigh strangled
by huge coils of ivy. They remind one of the snake
around the Laocoon. There seems no way to destroy
them unless the trees themselves are destroyed.
Every hour the rootlets of these vines are feeding
upon the life of the trees.
In looking at these trees one feels a sense of
pity come over him. There was a time when the
ivy was a tiny thing. Had it been dealt with then,
the trees would not now be its victims.
' JHffR BOLtOTT
*’'■* This is the way Satan does his work. With
f gieal pain o± heart do we recall many who have
gone down this way. There they are now. See
Lliem! They come and go as fast as moving pictures
on the canvas, neliold their wretchedness! God
take the memory oi it away. It is too awful to
a well upon.
But these characters were not always wretched.
Eveiy one of them had a chance to be better. They
were once clean. Their childish hearts beat with
hope. They dreamed of better days, but alas, Sa
tan came, and gradually entwined himself about
them, and now they are gone!
Destroy the Bible.
One of the first objects of Satan is to destroy
the Bible. This he has tried to do ever since he
entered the garden of Eden. He hates the book
because it is God’s chart and compass for the gov
ernment of the soul and the direction of the life.
He would not leave one vestige of it from Genesis
to Revelation. Like a raving lion who paces up
and down his cage with eager eyes to find away to
get out and destroy every living thing about him,
so Satan would destroy the Bible.
And not only does he hate the Bible, but he hates
everything and everybody who stands up for it.
Would you know that minister of the Gospel Satan
hates most? He is not necessarily that Right Rev
erend Doctor of Divinity who soars high in eccle
siastical circles. The minister Satan hates most is
he who most tenaciously and doggedly champions
the Word of God from lid to lid.
This has always been true. The man who in all
the ages of Church history, without compromise,
has called the world to battle around the inspired
Word is he who has had the hardest fight, but thank
God, it is also true he is the man who has Avon the
greatest victories.
Satan hates the Bible. If he cannot turn one
against it in its entirety, he takes it up in sections,
and tries to discredit it, and chop it into pieces.
Oh, the thousands of good men and women he has
carried down this road! He has carried many good
preachers in the crowd.
When I hear, or read, of a preacher who is spend
ing his time trying to prove that Adam was a
myth; that the whale that swallowed Jonah was
a boat; that Abraham was a fairy tale and Joseph
a dream, I put it down he has been learning in
this school of Satan.
There is nothing that so riles my feelings and
arouses my indignation as to see a man trying to
destroy the simple faith we have in the Bible. I
know the origin of his attack.
It was born with Satan whose every effort is to
put out the light that guides the soul from earth
to Heaven.
The Wreck of Conscience.
Again, Satan is after the wreck of conscience.
Conscience is not infallible. Many, perhaps, think
so, but it is not true. It bears the relation to truth
that the clock does to the sun. So long as the
clock is regulated by the sun, it marks correct
time, but let it alone and after awhile he who
follows it will find himself living day for night,
and night for day.
Satan wants to destroy conscience. So long as it
exists and is tender and responsive to sin, he is
prevented from doing his best work. Its sting under
the touch of sin is a warning; it is a red light at the
signal station that warns the soul not to go any
further.
Oh, how we have seen it check the course of sin!
Once I remember preaching in Norfolk, Va., on
the subject of “Restitution.” The next day, a
bright, handsome young man called at my hotel,
and asked to see me privatlely.
When we were quartered in my room and the
door locked, he pulled his chair up close to mine,
The Golden Age for August 16, 1906.
Le n G .
Broughton
and said: “I am the most miserable man out of
hell to-day. I have been systematically taking mon
ey from my firm. I have all the time fully expected
to pay it back when my returns come in, but last
night when I went home from Church, after hear
ing you preach, I began to think as I had never
thought before. Finally, I tried to put it out of
my mind, and go to sleep, but, sir, there was no
sleep for me. All night long, I rolled and tumbled.
It looked to me that the day never would come.
What am Ito do? I will kill myself if Ido not get
relief. ’ ’
Satan had not finished his work on that man.
He had not yet put out the red light in his lan
tern. It was still there, and brightly burning, the
red light of conscience.
Oh, men and women, have you still left your
conscience after the years of battle with this enemy?
Are you yet sensitive to sin? Does it make your
heart ache w T hen you do wrong? Then, you are
hopeful. Satan has not finished his work with you,
and God’s Spirit has not turned his back upon
you.
But it may not always be hopeful with you. More
and more as you yield to the seductive influence
of this wily monster you will find your conscience
becoming less and less sensitive to sin.
He Laughs at Sin.
Another trick of Satan is to laugh at sin. What
he would do is to have every soul feel that sin is
a small thing. Os course, he expects nothing but
that sensible, civilized people will abhor crime
and gross immorality, hence I am not dealing so
much with that side of my subject, but sin, simple,
unvarnished sin, which is rebellion against God’s
will, he would have us believe is a small thing.
How many promising lives and immortal desti
nies have been wrecked, and by this means.
It was just this that gave Satan his first introduc
tion to man. God made our foreparents, and put
them in the garden of Eden, where they could live
without sin. Satan came in, and got in the way
of God’s will.
God said to the first pair: “Os all the trees of
the garden thou shalt eat except one; of that, thou
shalt not eat, for the day thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die.”
What a blessed provision God made for Adam
and Eve. “Os all the trees in the garden thou
shalt eat, except one.”
A promise literally teeming with provisions
and only one prohibition. How thankful they
should have been.
But Satan came, and laughed at the thought of
their listening to God. It was such a trifle as he
represented it.
So he does his work to-day. God has thrown
around every creature of his blessings innumerable,
but with them is to be found now and then prohi
bitions.
For every soul he has a destiny, a mission to ful
fil, a place to fit in. What a blessed truth! Satan
knows this better than we do, and he wants to
break it up.
This is sin: setting at naught God’s will, taking
the rens of government out of God’s hands, and
holding them ourselves.
Sin is not a little thing; it is the most tremen
dous fact in human life. There is no problem that
weighs so much. Nations, empires and kingdoms
have their problems that are weighty and tremen
dous, but the man who stands up and offers a solu
tion for the great fact of sin is dealing with a
problem that weighs more than all the problems
of the earth. He is God’s statesman, an dis play
ing the role of God’s commoner.
Satan knows this, and is trying eveiy possible
way to minify sin and belittle the man who at
tempts to elucidate it.