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

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Conclusion 2. Secondly, Yet Satan hath such advantages for the knowledge of future things, and such means and helps for a discovery of them, that his conjectures have often come to pass.

[1.] First, He knows the causes of things, which are secret to us. Upon which he seems to foretell many things strange to us; as a physician may foretell the effects, workings, and issues of a disease, as seeing them in the causes, which would pass for little less than prophecy among the vulgar. Thus an astrologer foretells eclipses, which would be taken for a divine excellency, where the knowledge of the ground of these foretellings had not taken away the wonder.

[2.] Secondly, Many things are made known to him by immediate divine revelation. We know not the intercourse betwixt God and Satan in the matter of Job. Satan having obtained his commission to afflict him, might have made a long prophecy of what should come to pass in reference to Job, his children and substance. How many such predictions he might make, we little know.