“The devil is called the prince of this world, but he is not its absolute lord. He can even here do only what he is, for the purposes of love or justice, permitted to do. It may turn out, then, that he is forbidden to come to the assistance of his servants in the nick of time, even when he himself is disposed to do so. He may raise the storm, but there is One asleep in the bark, who can at any instant awake, and say to the winds and the waves, Peace, be still. It is not fitting that Satan should be able to keep his promises in the great majority of cases to the last, for that would leave too little chance of detecting his delusions, and would confirm his worship. His failures prove his malice, and also that his power is not his own, therefore that he is not God. They serve, too, as punishments to his dupes, for it is fitting that they who, through evil inclination and undue love of the world or of pleasure, trust to him, should ultimately fail in the very goods promised. “The principles of God’s providence are always and everywhere the same, and there is a close analogy between the natural and the supernatural. God has given to the universe its law. He has placed before man a real, substantial, and desirable good; but he has made this good attainable only in one way, by obedience to his law, which is not an arbitrary law, but a law founded in his own eternal reason, in his own infinite, eternal, and immutable justice. He who attempts to attain his good, his beatitude, by any other means, invariably and inevitably fails. It is as our Lord said,—‘I am the door;’ and ‘he that entereth not by the door, but climbeth up another way, the same is a thief and a robber.’ Whoever seeks entrance into the fold of happiness by another than the God-appointed way, whatever that way may be, is predoomed to disappointment. All experience proves it. The departure by the ancient Gentiles from the patriarchal or primitive religion, led to the confusion of their understandings, and to the adoption and practice of the grossest and most abominable superstitions—the extreme of moral or spiritual misery. The man who seeks happiness, even in this life, from acquiring or possessing riches and honor, always fails, even when he apparently succeeds. The most miserable of men are they who make pleasure their sole pursuit. The reason is, that beatitude is not promised to those pursuits, lies not on their plane, and is not attainable by following them. He who attempts to attain it in any of those ways is no wiser than those philosophers of Laputa who sought to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. It is only in accordance with the same principle, that they who seek worldly felicity, by consorting with devils, should in like manner be disappointed.”