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

143 страница из 220

In temptations to sin, we may observe, Satan walks by four general rules:—

1. First, He considers and acquaints himself with the condition of every man, and for that end he studies man. God’s question concerning Job, ‘Hast thou considered my servant Job?’ Job i. 8, doth imply, not only his diligent inquiry into Job’s state—for the original expresseth it by Satan’s ‘putting his heart upon Job, or laying him to his heart’175—but that this is usual with Satan so to do; as if God had said, It is thy way to pry narrowly into every man: hast thou done this to Job? Hast thou considered him as thou usest to do? And indeed Satan owns this as his business and employment in his answer to God, ‘I come from going to and fro in the earth, from walking up and down in it.’ This cannot be properly said of him who is a spirit. Bodies go up and down, but not spirits; so that his meaning is, he had been at his work of inquiring and searching. And so Broughton translates it,176 from searching to and fro in the earth; as it is said of the eyes of God, that they ‘run to and fro,’ which intends his intelligence, search, and knowledge of things. It is such a going to and fro as that in Dan. xii. 4, which is plainly there expressed to be for the increase of knowledge.