It is therefore the principal design of the devil, to hide the goodness and pleasantness of religion from you; and to make it appear to you as a terrible or tedious life. By this means it is that he keeps men from it; and by this means he is still endeavouring to draw you back again, and frustrate your good beginnings and your hopes. If he can thus misrepresent religion to your understandings, he will suddenly alienate your wills, and corrupt your lives, and make you turn to the world again, and seek for pleasure some where else, and only take up with some heartless lip-service, to keep up some deceitful hope of being saved. And the means which Satan useth to these ends are such as these: [Sidenote: How Satan would make religion seem to be a confounding, unpleasant thing--By difficulties.] 1. He will do his work to overwhelm you with appearing doubts and difficulties, and bring you to a loss, and to make religion seem to you a confounding and not a satisfying thing. This is one of his most dangerous assaults upon the weak and young beginners. Difficulties and passions are the things which he makes use of to confound you, and put you out of a regular, cheerful seeking of salvation. When you read the Scriptures, he will mind you of abundance of difficulties in all you read or hear. He will show you seeming contradictions; and tell you that you will never be able to understand these things. He will cast in thoughts of unbelief and blasphemy, and cause you, if he can, to roll them in your mind: if you cast them not out with abhorrence, but dispute with the devil, he hopes to prove too hard at least for such children and unprovided soldiers as you: and if you do reject them, and refuse to dispute it with him, he will sometimes tell you that your cause is naught, or else you need not be afraid to think of all that can be said against it; and this way he gets advantage of you to draw you to unbelief: and if you scape better than so, at least he will molest and terrify you with the hideousness of his temptations; and make you to think you are forsaken of God, because such blasphemous thoughts have been so often in your minds: and thus he will one while tempt you to blasphemy, and another while affright and torment you with the thoughts of such temptations.