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

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[4.] Fourthly, That malice must be great which will put itself forth where it knows it can prevail nothing, but is certain of a disappointment. Thus did Satan tempt Christ. Those speeches, ‘if thou be the Son of God,’ do not imply any doubt in Satan; he knew what was prophesied of Christ, and what had been declared from heaven in testification of him, so that he could not but be certain he was God and man; and yet what base unworthy temptations doth he lay before him, as ‘to fall down and worship him’! Was it that Satan thought to prevail against him? No surely; but such was his malice, that he would put an affront upon him, though he knew he could not prevail against him.

[5.] Fifthly, The malice of wicked men is an argument of Satan’s great malice. They have an antipathy against the righteous, as the wolf against the sheep, and upon that very ground, that they are ‘called out of the world.’ How great this fury is, all ages have testified. This hath brought forth discord, revilings, slanders, imprisonments, spoiling of goods, banishments, persecutions, tortures, cruel deaths, as burning, racking, tearing, sawing asunder, and whatever the wit of man could devise for a satisfaction to those implacable, furious, murderous minds; and yet all this is done to men of the same image and lineage with themselves, of the same religion with themselves, as to the main; nay, sometime to men of their own kindred, their own flesh and blood, and all to those that would live peaceably in the land. What shall we say to these things? How come men to put on a savage nature, to act the part of lions, leopards, tigers, if not much worse? The reason of all we have, John viii. 54, ‘Ye are of your father the devil; he was a murderer from the beginning:’ as also Gen. iii. 15, ‘I will put enmity between her seed and thy seed so that all this shews what malice is in Satan’s heart, who urgeth and provokes his instruments to such bloody hatreds. Hence whoever were the agents [Rev. ii. 10] in imprisoning the saints, the malice of Satan in stirring them up to it, makes him become the author of it; ‘Satan shall cast some of you into prison.’