Читать книгу Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations. In Three Parts онлайн

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Satan’s power being thus explained and proved, I shall next speak something of his cruelty.

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Of Satan’s cruelty.—Instances thereof in his dealing with wounded spirits, in ordinary temptations of the wicked and godly, in persecutions, cruelties in worship.—His cruel handling of his slaves.

He that shall consider his malice and power, must unavoidably conclude him to be cruel. Malice is always so where it hath the advantage of a proportionable strength and opportunity for the effecting of its hateful contrivances. It banisheth all pity and commiseration, and follows only the dictate of its own rage, with such fierceness, that it is only limited by wanting power to execute. We may then say of Satan, that according to his malice and power such is his cruelty. The truth of this will be abundantly manifested by instances: as,

1. First, From his desperate pursuits of advantage upon those whose spirits are wounded. The anguish of a distressed conscience is unspeakably great, insomuch that many are, as Heman, Ps. lxxxviii. 15, ‘even distracted, while they suffer the terrors of the Almighty.’ These, though they look round about them for help, and invite all that pass by to pity them, ‘because the hand of the Lord hath touched them,’ [Job xix. 21,] yet Satan laughs at their calamity, and mocks at them under their fears, and doth all he can to augment the flame. He suggests dreadful thoughts of an incensed majesty, begets terrible apprehensions of infinite wrath and damnation, he aggravates all their sins to make them seem unpardonable. Every action he calls a sin, and every sin he represents as a wilful forsaking of God, and every deliberate transgression he tells them is ‘the sin against the Holy Ghost.’ He baffles them in their prayers and services, and then accuseth their duties for intolerable profanations of God’s name; and if they be at last affrighted from them, he then clamours that they are ‘forsaken of God’ because they have forsaken him. He, as a right Baal-zebub,132 rakes in their wounds, as flies are ever sucking where there is a sore. Their outcries and lamentations are such music to him, that he gives them no rest; and with such triumph doth he tread upon those that thus lie in the dust, that he makes them sometimes accuse themselves for that which they never did, and in derision he insults over them in their greatest perplexities, with this, ‘Where is now thy God?’ [Ps. xlii. 3,] and ‘Who shall deliver thee out of my hand?’ This were enough to evidence him altogether void of compassion. But,