The service of Satan is odious, on account of the companions with whom you must associate. You become the associate of demons, murderers, thieves, harlots, drunkards, and villains of every hue. The promises which the devil holds out to you are all false, and his words all delusive. He holds out to you an illusory hope of liberty and happiness, and deceives you with glittering but unreal pictures of future enjoyment. {129} For these you renounce Christian self-denial; for these you throw down the Cross of Christ, abandon the straight and narrow way, and sacrifice your hopes of heaven. But the devil will disappoint you. The pleasure he will give you will leave behind in your heart only bitterness and disgust. You will have to endure in his service labors and sufferings more than enough to make you a saint, if you performed them for God. You threw down the cross which God placed on your shoulders. It was a light cross, and was exactly measured for your size and strength. It was a cross full of blessings and graces, and if you had carried it courageously up the narrow way of life, after a time it would have supported you, and you would have been borne up by it to the gate of heaven. But you threw it down, because it was too heavy and galling, and turned from the steep path of virtue to the downward, flowery road of sin. Immediately the devil came up behind you, and fastened on your back an immense cross of rough, unhewn timber. {130} Loaded with this devil's cross, you are stumbling along the way of perdition toward the mouth of hell, into which you will fall at death, with the heavy burden of your sins on your back to press you down, and crush you forever beneath its weight. Such is the hard and bitter slavery to which you have bound yourself under this detestable tyrant. Moreover, his cause is a desperate one. A certain and ignominious defeat, from which he will never more arise, awaits him. He has already been conquered. Jesus Christ met him once in single combat in the desert, and put him to an ignominious flight. Afterwards, on the cross, He gained a still more signal and decisive victory over him, and made him serve by his own plan for our Lord's destruction, as an instrument for accomplishing our salvation. The Blessed Virgin has trampled on the head of this malicious serpent. All the saints and martyrs have triumphed over him, and the weakest Christian child can put him to flight, by resisting his temptations--by breathing a little prayer, or by making the sign of the cross. He is a weak and miserable coward. His cause is already desperate and lost. And although God allows him a certain liberty to tempt and trouble the world for a short time, the day of judgment is fast approaching, in which Jesus Christ will put him to shame before the whole universe, and cast him, together with all those who follow his standard, into the burning abyss of hell. {131}