Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee." Jude 9. Some indeed, identify this passage with that already cited from Zechariah, explaining it of the Jewish polity, or Mosaic law; and would therefore object against our advancing it as an additional testimony; but for such identification we can see no warrant. It would rather seem to refer to the fact, that the Lord so hid the actual, human body of Moses, that "No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." Deut. xxxiv. 6.

These occasional glimpses of the invisible world are exceedingly awful: instead of regarding the adversary as a contemptible being, we can scarcely overrate his importance. Possessed of a power that we cannot rightly estimate, and filled with a malignity the most direful and implacable, he is not a solitary individual waging alone the war of rebellion and ruin he has hosts unnumbered at command, as we have already shewn; and doubtless he knows too well the value of order and subordination not to avail himself, as a skilful general, of his whole disposable force. What, then, is his employment, and to what object does he bend these superhuman energies and mighty means? The answer may be found in any part of the Biblewe trace him by his operations, where he is not actually named; and we know that so far as it concerns us, all may be summed up in three words, Hostility to man. He sought to deface the work of creation, in its bright

morning prime; and to a sad extent he succeeded: the work of redemption was undertaken, through the tender mercies of God, to repair that deadly breach; and to resist it is the perpetual aim of Satan and his angels. Alike to him is the task to impede a great national movement towards Christ, and to lure a little child from the way of righteousness. In either case he puts forth his subtle power, and never loses sight of the object. Foreknowledge he does not possess: that is the prerogative of Deity alone; but his calculations must be wonderfully accurate, considering that to the high angelic faculties of his nature he adds the experience of some six thousand years of intimate concern in the affairs of man; and a perfect acquaintance with all knowledge and all mysteries, attainable by created intelligence. Before him are spread out all the phenomena of nature: the stars in their courses, the ocean in its depths, the earth in her hidden recesses, and all the complicated operations of her vast elemental laboratory, are visible to him. Long ere the shadow of a cloud encroaches on the unruffled sky bounded by our horizon, he perceives the coming storm, and prepares to seize such victims as he hopes may be delivered to him during the terrible convulsion. While all above is peace and serenity, he watches the internal combustion, and gloats over the slumbering city about to be inundated with a flood of burning lava, or swallowed in the yawning chasms of this quaking earth. He looks into

man's wonderful frame, and with a practised skill that no refinement of mortal art can attain to, marks the seeds of incipient disease, as they take root, and tend, perhaps unsuspected by the heedless individual, to the harvest of death-too often, alas! a harvest of wrath and ruin. Omnipresence is not his; but motion quicker than our thoughts he can no doubt command; and with an army of zealous followers, well trained to execute his behests, he may leave it in their hands to work out some deep-laid scheme of his devising in one quarter, while he speeds to the uttermost part of the earth to pursue the same employment, perhaps in a distinct form; perhaps so as to harmonize with, and to help forward the preceding mischief.

me.

In order rightly to estimate the peril that we are in from this tremendous enemy, we must consider, first, that all are sinners, condemned by the law of God; that "without shedding of blood there is no remission," and that, therefore, each individual believer may and must say of Christ, He loved me, and gave himself for Christ will never overlook, or be indifferent to any soul for which he shed his precious blood: in their final salvation he sees the travail of his own soul, and is satisfied and we have no lack of evidence that to wrest a single human being from the hand of the Saviour is an enterprise, however hopeless, in which Satan is content to embark all his energies; and to put into motion all the vast machinery placed at his disposal. He de

sires to have them that he may sift them as wheat; yet to judge by the language of many excellent people, it would seem as though they considered their own corrupt nature and evil tendencies as the only hindrance in the heavenly race. This is a dangerous mistake: the Bible shews us in a most impressive manner how our adversary works upon that nature which he first prevailed to corrupt. David, full of ease and abundance, meditates on the extent and stability of his wide kingdom, and Satan takes advantage of it to suggest an act which he knew would be highly displeasing to the Lord, and probably bring a judgment on the nation. "Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel." 1 Chron. xxi. 1. Even Joab, the most godless, unscrupulous man, and at the same time the most devoted subject and zealous patriot, saw the danger of this foolish act, and remonstrated against it. But the Devil had possessed the king's mind with a fancy in which he would not submit to be crossed, and the consequence was a destroying visitation on the land. Job was pious and prosperous: the enemy attributed his godliness to his gains, and obtained leave to try him by heavy losses, calamities, and bodily sufferings; then stirred up his wife to counsel blasphemy and suicide, and failing of that, instigated his friends to tax him with hypocrisy, and to represent these afflictions as an evident judgment from God, sent to brand him in the sight of the world as a gross though secret transgressor. Of

all his infernal devices this is one of the worst, and by no means unfrequent. Satan first, by the divine permission, afflicts a child of God, and then works on the pride, the rashness, the folly of some friend, to pour corrosive acids into the wound where the softest oil of Christian sympathy and love ought rather to trickle down. The operator sees a cause and a need-be for his friend's grievance far removed from those which the Lord saw when he smote; and taking this phantom of Satan's conjuring-up for a reality, proceeds to do the arch-fiend's bidding by helping forward the affliction in a clumsy attempt to deal wisely with it. Thus he tormented Job, by means of his three friends, whom he also exposed to the Lord's severe displeasure by provoking them to such presumptuous sin; while Job, whose real fault was unremoved blindness to the corruption of his nature, reaped a two-fold temporal, and a ten thousandfold spiritual blessing from what the Devil hoped to turn to his destruction. Judas was of a covetous disposition, and would have been a thief whenever he had opportunity; but Satan marked him out for the deepest crime that it was possible for man to perpetrate once throughout all eternity." Then entered Satan into Judas, surnamed Iscariot:" Luke xxii. 3. What an awful expression is that! the chief adversary of God and man became for a time incarnate to oppose, and by opposing to accomplish, the great object of the Lord Jehovah in coming down to earth. He pervaded with his diabolical