What a frightening suggestion this offers! He who knows us so well, better than we know ourselves, better than anyone knows us save G.o.d and our Guardian Angel, sees ever in us possibilities of final and eternal failure. There is always some definite thing in us that buoys up his hope that he may yet be able to persuade or deceive us into rejecting the service of G.o.d and accepting {39} his. Every time we yield to the slightest sin or laxity, we encourage and embolden him still more, until he feels that he can safely attack the soul that but a little time before he feared. It is thus that we become responsible for our own temptations, raise up occasions for sin, and give, by our often deliberate acts, vantage ground and footing to him from which he can drive home a deadly stroke.
(4) A fourth characteristic is the patience with which he works. He bides his time. We should naturally think that when he found a soul in a sinful environment he would immediately use the occasion to lead it into some serious sin, but by no means does he always take this course.
Often in the most sinful surroundings he does not, for a long time, allow the sight of sin to suggest partic.i.p.ation in it. He waits until we are accustomed to its presence; until the sense of shock wears off.
He begins by getting us to tolerate the fact of sin about us, for he knows that any toleration of sin in the general life with which we are surrounded is a long step towards tolerating it in ourselves.
So he waits with a patience born of a deep-laid plot. He notes that after a while we see our Lord fearfully dishonoured, and our souls are not thereby grieved and outraged; that we come {40} and go in a world where He is being crucified daily, but with a smiling countenance that masks no broken heart beneath.
Then he begins to insinuate his suggestions to evil. Perhaps the temptation at first is to some slight sin only, merely venial. He would not rouse our slumbering conscience by the frightening temptations to that which is serious. But Satan has no interest in a soul committing venial sins merely for their own sake. Venial sin cannot deliver us into his power, and cannot keep us out of heaven.
It is well for us to remember this. Satan cares nothing for venial sin _per se_. He never tempts a soul to it save as a cunningly laid preparation for that deadly sin which follows logically upon a long and reckless course of venial sin; and the soul that deliberately yields to little temptations is knowingly, wilfully, and deliberately aiding and abetting the devil in his plan for the supreme dishonour of our G.o.d.
So through all these steps the Satanic patience endures. He sees the soul"s sensibilities becoming more and more blunted; the conscience less and less sensitive. He sees the little act of sin lightly consented to, then the habit formed. He marks the soul"s defences crumbling, and in a well-chosen hour, subtly and in some familiar {41} guise, he presents the temptation to the great offence, and his triumph is complete.
(5) The last characteristic we shall consider is his ready adaptability to every circ.u.mstance that transpires in the midst of the battle. He cares not how we are tempted, if only our fall can be secured. We, in our self-will, often desire to serve G.o.d in some particular way, and lose interest when we have to change our method. Satan gives us an example in this, for he cares not how he fights, if only he can, in some small measure at least, accomplish G.o.d"s dishonour. He has no pet plans to which he clings in a self-willed way. Utterly devoted to his cause, he feels no reluctance or sense of personal chagrin at having to give up a certain method he has been using to dishonour G.o.d in us. He gladly and immediately resigns what he finds is not to the purpose.
We see this ill.u.s.trated in the swiftness with which he shifts the point of attack, often with great readiness and seeming graciousness accepting as his own the point of view from which we reject his first overture.
This is vividly ill.u.s.trated in his temptation of our Lord in the wilderness. In response to the first temptation, our Lord shows that man is not to live by bread alone, not by merely natural means, even though in themselves they may be {42} good, but that he is to be sustained by a trust in G.o.d. Instantly Satan changes his front. He takes Him up upon a pinnacle of the temple and delivers the second temptation, which in substance is this: "You are entirely right. G.o.d must be trusted implicitly and in all things. Now give an evidence of your trust in Him. Cast yourself down, for it is written--(and here we see how the devil so completely shifts to our Lord"s point of view that he begins to quote Scripture himself),--"He shall give His angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." But the Blessed One could not be deceived. Again fell the crushing _Scriptum est_, and again the tempter is vanquished.
As we have just seen in his quotation from Scripture, if it suits his purpose he will make use of the best and holiest things if only he can balk G.o.d"s will,--things which, in themselves, he must fear and hate.
"So he may cozen and deceive thee, he cares not whether it be by truth or falsehood," says a Kempis.[18] He will try to induce us to go to church when he knows that in so doing we may be neglecting plain, G.o.d-sent duties at home. He could not possibly desire us to meditate on holy things, and yet a {43} self-willed meditation, to the neglect of charity or obedience, is most pleasing to him, and he will incite us to it, even smoothing the way for us, suggesting to us beautiful and holy thoughts, and glad to help us with our meditation because he knows it is being made selfishly, and therefore contrary to the divine will.
V. _The Soul"s Safety_
Our a.s.surance of escaping the power of this malignant and tireless foe lies:
(1) In never parleying or arguing with him. He is far cleverer than we are, and if we stop to consider his proposals, or to reason about them, our fate will, sooner or later, be that of our first mother, who, because she was willing to hear what the tempter had to say, found herself deceived to her utter undoing. Our only safe course lies in instant and vigorous rejection of all that he suggests.
(2) But, although we shall see later that it is often wise to ignore him wholly,[19] our resistance is not to be merely a pa.s.sive one. We are to meet point with point, attack with counter-attack. If he is tirelessly active in his cause, there must be in us a corresponding activity and zeal for G.o.d"s {44} service and for the safety of our souls; a like aggressive spirit, a forcing of circ.u.mstances and conditions, wherever possible, that glory may be won for our King, and the power of the devil diminished; a like persistency, and equal alertness, a ready trying of one method, then another; and no matter what past failures may have been, a continuing the fight, that in the end we may be worthy of the victory.
If we can learn these lessons, though the strength and prowess of Satan be an hundred-fold greater than that which human might can own, yet we shall have no fear of him. On the contrary he will fear us, delivering his attacks warily, lest he find his power shattered by the weapons with which we shall be able to oppose him.
We were considering a little while ago how Satan "walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."[20] These words of St. Peter have another significance. True, he goes about with strong and ceaseless aggression, but he goes about seeking only those whom he _may_ devour.
He does not fall without discretion upon the throngs of men, as the lion upon the flock. He seeks only those who will, he thinks, in the end yield themselves to him. He skulks about, hiding himself, seeking, as we have seen, to blind men to the {45} very fact of his existence, until he finds opportunity for attack when he thinks the soul will yield. Some strong souls he does not openly seek, for too often has he been defeated by them, and he fears to tempt them save in some insidious, hidden way. In dealing with such souls he loses his lion-like character, and lies in ambush like the coward who is afraid to strike save from behind.
A great comfort, therefore, we must draw from the thought that Satan"s career has been one of failure as well as of victory. G.o.d"s Saints, following the lead of the King of Saints, have on a thousand battle-fields trampled him under their feet; and with whatever insolent confidence he may approach us, it is never without a haunting, unnerving fear lest the issue be what it has been many times before, a crushing defeat.
It is not the weak human soul only that trembles at the impending conflict, but the soul of Satan, so often beaten down and humiliated at the hands of the weakest of the soldiers of G.o.d.
[1] 2 Cor. xi, 3.
[2] 1 Tim. ii, 14.
[3] St. John viii, 44.
[4] 2 Cor. iv, 4.
[5] 2 Cor. xi, 14.
[6] St. Mark xiii, 22.
[7] _Imitation_, I, xiii.
[8] "The soul, from her nature, always relishes good, though it is true that the soul, blinded by self-love, does not know and discern what is true good."--St. Catherine of Siena, _Dialogue_, p. 122. (Thorold Trans., London, 1907.)
[9] "There is something satanic in the contempt and the ridicule with which men treat Satan. I say it is satanic because it is a Satanic illusion to make men cease to fear him, or cease even to believe in him. He is never more completely master of a man than when the man ridicules his existence,--when, as we hear in these days, men say, "There is no devil.""--H. E. Manning, _Sin and Its Consequences_, pp.
168-169.
[10] St. Luke xvi, 8.
[11] It is perhaps best to avoid such expressions as "personality of evil," lest they be misunderstood. "Evil cannot be personal in or of itself; it can only obtain the advantages of personal embodiment and action by being accepted by an already existing creature, endowed with will,--a creature which freely determines implicitly to accept it by rejecting good.... In Satan evil has become dominant and fixed as in a previously existing personal being; there was no such thing in the universe of the Almighty and All-good G.o.d as a self-existing or originally created devil."--Liddon, _Pa.s.siontide Sermons_, p. 95.
[12] "What do they exactly mean by this imposing phrase? How can evil itself be, strictly speaking, a principle? The essence of evil is absence of principle, principle being something positive. Evil is contradiction to positive principle."--Liddon, _Pa.s.siontide Sermons_, p. 88.
[13] Gen. i, 31.
[14] Gen. iii, 5, or rather "as G.o.d." The word in the Hebrew is simply _Elohim_.
[15] St. Mark i, 11.
[16] See Pusey, _Parochial Sermons_, Vol. II, p. 148.
[17] 1 St. Peter v, 8.
[18] _Imitation_, IV, x.x.x.
[19] See page 142.
[20] 1 St. Peter v, 8.
{46}
CHAPTER IV
THE UNIVERSALITY OF TEMPTATION
I. _The Common Lot_
"So long as we live in this world we cannot be without tribulation and temptation. Whence it is written in Job,[1] "The life of man upon earth is a temptation.""[2]
Man did not have to wait for the full revelation of G.o.d in His Son before knowing this truth. Holy Job testifies to it out of his own experience, and the Son of Sirach gives the warning, "My son, if thou come to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation."[3] The constant and definite warning and promise of our Lord and His Apostles were to the same effect. In the only prayer He taught His disciples, a prayer He commands us to use daily, they are taught to say, "Lead us not into temptation";[4] and on the night in which He was betrayed, full of tender solicitude for their souls, He warns them, "Pray that ye enter not into temptation."[5]