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

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2. Secondly, If this help not, then he seeks to get the advantage of a provoked, passionate, or otherwise distempered fit; and then hatred is easily procured against anything that comes in its way.

3. Thirdly, Satan endeavours to engage our hatred against the light, by presenting our interest as shaken or endangered by it. If interest can be drawn in and made a party, it is not difficult to put all the passions of a man in arms, to give open defiance to any discovery it can make. That great rage and tumult of kings and people mentioned in Psalm ii., combining and taking counsel against the Lord and his laws, is upon the quarrel of interest. Their suspicions and jealousies that the setting up of Christ upon his throne would eclipse their power and greatness, makes them, out of a desperate hatred against the light, fall into resolves of open rebellion against his laws: ‘Let us break his bands asunder, and cast away his cords from us.’ This pretence of interest strengthened the accusation of Amaziah against Amos: chap. vii. 10, ‘Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel: the land is not able to bear all his words.’ No wonder, then, if Jeroboam, instead of hearkening to the threatening, banish him out of the land. We find the like in Asa, a good man; the devil stirs up his hatred against the seer: ‘He was wroth with him, and put him in the prison-house; for he was in a rage against him,’ 2 Chron. xvi. 10. The ground of that rage was this: the king’s interest, in his apprehension, was wrapped up in that league with the king of Syria, ver. 2, 3, so that he could not bear so plain a reproof, which directly laid the axe to the root of so great an interest as the safety of the king and kingdom, which seemed to depend so much upon that league.