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

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8. Eighthly, It is usual for Satan to still and quiet the stirring thoughts of sinners with hopes and assurances of secrecy. As children are quieted and pleased with toys and rattles, so are sinners put off and diverted from prosecuting the discoveries that the light would make in them, by this confidence, that though they have done amiss, yet their miscarriages shall not be laid open or manifested before men. It is incredible how much the hopes of concealment doth satisfy and delight those that have some sense of guilt. Sometime men are impudent, that ‘they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not,’ Isa. iii. 9. But before they arrive at so great an impudency, they usually ‘seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark; and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?’ Isa. xxix. 15. Like those foolish creatures that think themselves sufficiently concealed by hiding their heads in a bush, though all their bodies be exposed to open view, Isa. xxviii. 15, those that made ‘lies their refuge, and under falsehood hid themselves,’ became as confident of their security as if they had ‘made a covenant with death, and were at an agreement with hell;’ and when they have continued in this course for some time with impunity, the light is so banished that they carry it so as if God observed their actions done in the dark as little as men do. ‘How doth God know?’ say they; ‘can he judge through the dark clouds? thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not,’ Job xxii. 13. And hence proceed they to promise themselves a safety from judgments: ‘When the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come nigh unto us, for we have made lies our refuge,’ &c.