Satan shoots "fiery darts"--arrows--at us; he may come, as he did to the Master, and find nothing in us; our hearts may be clean. But from a source entirely unexpected--here comes a flaming arrow--burning its way into the heart, igniting with hatred and misunderstanding friends and enemies in a manner never dreamed of before. How often the blow comes from the one place least expected, and for that reason all the more deadly. We are guarded in some directions, but over the walls of our stockade the Devil sends his fiery darts, and we are swept away in a satanic conflagration. It requires the "whole armour"--and the shield of faith to quench the flaming arrows from his quiver. He is the world's incomparable archer; when all other methods fail, he shoots us with poisoned, fiery darts. The mother of Achilles baptized him in the river Styx, making him invulnerable to the weapons of the enemy; she held him by the heel during the baptismal ceremony; the heel only remained untouched by the protecting waters of the fabulous Styx. One of the gods became acquainted with this fact, and shot him to death in the heel, the one vulnerable spot. Again, we repeat, we are not safe without the "whole armour of God," and the "shield of faith." Bear in mind, also, the Incomparable Archer takes a more deliberate aim if it is a shining mark, and exults most when he can lay low in the dust, wounded and disabled, one dowered with unusual capacity for noble service. XXII THE FATHER OF LIARS "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."--_John viii. 44._ "Sin has many tools, but a lie is a handle which fits them all."--_O. W. Holmes._ Satan opened his propaganda with a slanderous lie; this lie was believed by the innocent parents of the race. Simple and modest as this lie seemed to be, it opened a crevice in the moral government of God. Confidence, fellowship, and filial relations were destroyed by the breach. The nature and character of a lie may best be understood, and we can get the estimate God places on it, by carefully studying the damages it wrought. Eden was lost, God's favour lost, peace and plenty lost, innocence lost; humiliation, fear, banishment, toil, sweat, suffering and death took the place of Eden's pristine glories. Nothing so reveals the depths to which Lucifer had fallen--and his great intelligence, losing none of its acumen, exercised in a way fitting to his depravity of character, as the launching of a lie. He has done nothing since--which more clearly exemplifies the Being our Bible teaches that he is. An egg was laid and a lie was hatched; this lie has gone out spreading at a geometrical progression until the infinitude of God's footstool has felt the discordant jar.