read that when the devil was sometime forward to give his testimony to Christ, as Mark i. 25, ‘I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God,’ Jesus rebuked him, and commanded him to hold his peace. He clearly saw that he confessed him not to honour him, but by such a particular acknowledgment to stir up the rage and fury of the people against him. To this end Satan, in Acts xvi. 17, many days together publicly owns Paul and Silas, ‘These men are the servants of the most high God, which shew unto us the way of salvation.’ Though he spake truth, yet had he a malicious aim in it, which he accordingly brought about by this means; and that was to raise up persecution against them, and to give ground to that accusation which they afterwards met withal; ver. 21, ‘That they taught customs which were not lawful to be received.’ But (3.) his particular spite against God in seeking to undermine his service is further manifested in this, that the devil is not content to root out the service due to God, but when he hath done that, he delights to abuse those places where the name of God was most celebrated, with greatest profanations. I shall not in this insist upon the conjecture of Tilenus,[198] that _Sylva Dodonœa_, a place highly abused by the devil, and respected for an oracle, was the seat or a religious place of Dodanim, mentioned in Gen. x. 4; nor upon that supposal, mentioned also by the same author, that the oracle of Jupiter Hammon was the place where Cham [Ham] practised that religious worship which he learned in his father’s house. We have at hand more certain evidences of the devil’s spite. Such was his abuse of the tabernacle by the profane sons of Eli, who profaned that place with their uncleanness and filthy adulteries. Such was his carriage to the ark while it was captivated by the Philistines. Of like nature were his attempts against the temple itself. Solomon in his latter days was tempted to give an affront to it: he built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, 1 Kings xi. 7, in the very sight and face of the temple; but afterward he prepared to defile the temple itself. Gilgal and Beth-aven are places of such high profanation, that the prophet Hosea, chap. ix. 15, tells them ‘all their wickedness was in Gilgal,’ none of their abominations were like to those; and in chap. iv. 15, they are dehorted from going to Gilgal or Beth-aven; and yet both these places had been famous for religion before.[199] Gilgal was the place of the general circumcision of the Israelites that were born in the wilderness; there was their first solemn passover kept after their entering into the land. Bethel was a place where God as it were kept house, ‘the house of God.’ Here Jacob had his vision. But the more famous they had been for duties of worship, the devil sought to put higher abuses upon them, so that Gilgal became ‘an hatred,’ and Bethel became a Beth-aven, ‘an house of vanity.’