We were considering a little while ago how Satan "walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."[20] These words of St. Peter have another significance. True, he goes about with strong and ceaseless aggression, but he goes about seeking only those whom he _may_ devour. He does not fall without discretion upon the throngs of men, as the lion upon the flock. He seeks only those who will, he thinks, in the end yield themselves to him. He skulks about, hiding himself, seeking, as we have seen, to blind men to the {45} very fact of his existence, until he finds opportunity for attack when he thinks the soul will yield. Some strong souls he does not openly seek, for too often has he been defeated by them, and he fears to tempt them save in some insidious, hidden way. In dealing with such souls he loses his lion-like character, and lies in ambush like the coward who is afraid to strike save from behind. A great comfort, therefore, we must draw from the thought that Satan's career has been one of failure as well as of victory. God's Saints, following the lead of the King of Saints, have on a thousand battle-fields trampled him under their feet; and with whatever insolent confidence he may approach us, it is never without a haunting, unnerving fear lest the issue be what it has been many times before, a crushing defeat. It is not the weak human soul only that trembles at the impending conflict, but the soul of Satan, so often beaten down and humiliated at the hands of the weakest of the soldiers of God. [1] 2 Cor. xi, 3. [2] 1 Tim. ii, 14. [3] St. John viii, 44. [4] 2 Cor. iv, 4. [5] 2 Cor. xi, 14. [6] St. Mark xiii, 22. [7] _Imitation_, I, xiii. [8] "The soul, from her nature, always relishes good, though it is true that the soul, blinded by self-love, does not know and discern what is true good."--St. Catherine of Siena, _Dialogue_, p. 122. (Thorold Trans., London, 1907.) [9] "There is something satanic in the contempt and the ridicule with which men treat Satan. I say it is satanic because it is a Satanic illusion to make men cease to fear him, or cease even to believe in him. He is never more completely master of a man than when the man ridicules his existence,--when, as we hear in these days, men say, 'There is no devil.'"--H. E. Manning, _Sin and Its Consequences_, pp. 168-169. [10] St. Luke xvi, 8. [11] It is perhaps best to avoid such expressions as "personality of evil," lest they be misunderstood. "Evil cannot be personal in or of itself; it can only obtain the advantages of personal embodiment and action by being accepted by an already existing creature, endowed with will,--a creature which freely determines implicitly to accept it by rejecting good.... In Satan evil has become dominant and fixed as in a previously existing personal being; there was no such thing in the universe of the Almighty and All-good God as a self-existing or originally created devil."--Liddon, _Passiontide Sermons_, p. 95.