As an example of this, let us take his language toward the Apostle Peter. With the habits of modern Christianity, the caution of Christ to Peter would have been expressed much on this fashion: "Simon, Simon, thou art impulsive, and liable to be carried away with sudden impressions. The Jews are about to make an attack on me which will endanger thee." This was the exterior view of the situation, but our Lord did not take it. He said, "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have thee that he may sift thee as wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not." This Satan was a person ever present in the mind of Christ. He was ever in his view as the invisible force by which all the visible antagonistic forces were ruled. When his disciples came home in triumph to relate the successes of their first preaching tour, Christ said, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." When the Apostle Peter rebuked him for prophesying the tragical end of his earthly career, Christ answered not him, but the invisible spirit whose influence over him he recognized: "Get thee behind me, Satan! Thou art an offense unto me." When the Saviour's last trial approached, he announced the coming crisis in the words, "The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me." When he gave himself into the hands of the Sanhedrim, he said, "This is your hour and that of the powers of darkness." When disputing with the unbelieving Jews, he told them that they were of their father, the devil; that he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth; that when he spoke a lie he spoke of his own, for he was a liar, and the father of lies. In short, the life of Christ, as viewed by himself, was not a conflict with enemies _in the flesh_, but with an invisible enemy, artful, powerful, old as the foundations of the world, and ruling by his influences over evil spirits and men in the flesh. The same was the doctrine taught by the Apostles. In reading the Epistles we see in the strongest language how the whole visible world was up in arms against them. St. Paul gives this catalogue of his physical and worldly sufferings, proving his right to apostleship mainly by perseverance in persecution. "In labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft; of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one; thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned; thrice have I suffered shipwreck--a night and a day have I been in the deep. In journeyings often, in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils among false brethren."