The Great Controversy Between Christ and SatanWhite, Ellen Gould Harmon
ReligionComparative
The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan
White, Ellen Gould Harmon
Good and evil; Seventh-Day Adventists -- Doctrines; Spiritual direction
“Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbors or say his prayers ... without danger of committing a
capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner; when the guillotine was
long and hard at work every morning; when the jails were filled as close
as the holds of a slave-ship; when the gutters ran foaming with blood into
the Seine.... While the daily wagon-loads of victims were carried to their
doom through the streets of Paris, the proconsuls, whom the sovereign
committee had sent forth to the departments, reveled in an extravagance of
cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the deadly machine rose
and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long rows of captives were
mowed down with grape-shot. Holes were made in the bottom of crowded
barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even the cruel mercy of a
speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All down the Loire, from Saumur
to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites feasted on naked corpses,
twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy was shown to sex or age. The
number of young lads and of girls of seventeen who were murdered by that
execrable government, is to be reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the
breast were tossed from pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks.”(417) In the
short space of ten years, multitudes of human beings perished.
All this was as Satan would have it. This was what for ages he had been
working to secure. His policy is deception from first to last, and his
steadfast purpose is to bring woe and wretchedness upon men, to deface and
defile the workmanship of God, to mar the divine purposes of benevolence
and love, and thus cause grief in heaven. Then by his deceptive arts he
blinds the minds of men, and leads them to throw back the blame of his
work upon God, as if all this misery were the result of the Creator’s
plan. In like manner, when those who have been degraded and brutalized
through his cruel power achieve their freedom, he urges them on to
excesses and atrocities. Then this picture of unbridled license is pointed
out by tyrants and oppressors as an illustration of the results of
liberty.
When error in one garb has been detected, Satan only masks it in a
different disguise, and multitudes receive it as eagerly as at the first.
When the people found Romanism to be a deception, and he could not through
this agency lead them to transgression of God’s law, he urged them to
regard all religion as a cheat, and the Bible a fable; and casting aside
the divine statutes, they gave themselves up to unbridled iniquity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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