"Then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation. They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations provoked they him to anger. They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not."--_Deuteronomy xxxii. 15-17._ "But I say the things which the Gentiles sacrificed, they sacrificed to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and the table of devils."--_1 Corinthians x. 20-21._ Satan's consuming passion is thirst for power. He is the "prince of darkness," but also the "god of this world," and this long period of satanic rule is called _night_. God's glorious Sabbath of rest was superseded by the black intervention of toil and suffering. Satan's scheming fight has been for the rulership of this world. He succeeded in winning the entire antediluvian world, which to save the coming generations necessitated the Flood. He began adroitly with the only remaining family; swept the postdiluvian peoples into midnight heathenism. To-day, nearly one billion descendants of Noah worship not God--but _demonian_--demons, just what the Greeks and Romans worshipped in Apostolic times. No less than two hundred and fifty million are devil worshippers by name. Satan began his fight of opposition by assuming the form or incarnating himself in the body of a snake. Therefore it is not an accident, growing out of mythological tradition, that serpent worship has been the chief religion of many peoples. The Egyptians worshipped Set, which personified all evil--enemy of all good--they called Typhon, a monstrous serpent-like animal. To this god human sacrifices were offered on great religious holidays. It is no accident that the millions who know not the true God nevertheless, some way, learned to worship the Devil, and generally in the form of a serpent. The Egyptians had a serpent-god in Typhon; the Canaanites worshipped a snake in the days of Abraham; the Babylonians worshipped Python, which is a specie of the most deadly reptile on earth, and another name for Typhon. On the monuments and tablets of many dead civilizations the engravings of serpents show their particular customs of devil worship. The American Indians were snake worshippers; in Ohio an altar more than a half mile in length remains in good preservation. This altar is one of the wonders, being a perfect outline of a gigantic snake. We readily see that tribal association and tradition have had nothing to do with the customs of our own aborigines; the same being who inspired the peoples of the Old Orient, millenniums ago, to worship the snake-devil inspired our red men in his primeval forest.