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

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Upon this consideration I might rationally fix my prognostic of the entertainment of the following treatise. What acceptance soever it may find with such as are cordially concerned for their souls and the realities of religion—and of such I may say as the apostle Paul concerning brotherly love, 1 Thes. iv. 9, as touching this matter, ‘They need not that I write unto them, for they themselves are taught of God’ to be suspicious of Satan’s devices; and by experience they find his deceits so secret, and withal so dangerous, that any help for further discovery and caution must needs be welcome to them; yet—to be sure the prince of darkness, who is always jealous of the least attempts that may be made against his empire, will arm his forementioned subjects against it, and whomsoever else he can prevail upon, by the power of prejudice, to reject it, as urging us to a study more severe or harsh than is consistent either with the lower degrees of knowledge of many, or with that ease which most men desire to indulge to themselves; or as offering such things which they, to save themselves from further trouble, will be willing to call chimeras or idle speculations: and this last I may rather expect, because in this latter age Satan hath advanced so far in his general design against all Christianity, and for the introduction of paganism and atheism, that none now can express a serious conscientious care for holiness and the avoidance of sin, but upon pain of the imputation of silliness or whining preciseness; and none can speak or write of conversion, faith, or grace, but he shall be hazarded by the scoffs of those that are unwilling to judge the private workings of the heart to God-ward, or spiritual exercises of grace, to be any better than conceited whims and unintelligible nonsense: but seeing such men make bold to jeer, not only that language and those forms of speech which the Holy Ghost thought fit to make use of in the Scriptures, but also the very things of ‘Faith,’ ‘Grace,’ and ‘Spirit,’ which are everywhere in the sacred oracles recommended to us with the most weighty seriousness—which with them pass for no better than cheats and fancies—we can easily sit under their contempt; and shall, as we hope, be so far from being jeered out of our religion, that their scorns shall have no more impression upon us than the ravings of a frenzical person that knows not what he speaks.