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4 \ I Is I lt» l* im 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.