them. Of course the degrees of evil or power may vary. I speak of its character and source merely.
Satan originates nothing. That is God’s prerogative. The work of Satan is to mar and break down what God has wrought, when that is left, as an effect produced, to the responsibility of man. God created Adam. Satan spoiled the work through man’s folly. There was but one whom he could not touch down here; in whom, having laid his defiling hand on all else as prince of this world, he could find nothing. He can originate nothing, but he can build up with vast sagacity an immense system, out of the corruption, suited to the evil which is in us; yea, and stamped with the character of the evil in us to which it is so suited. What would money be without avarice? Or worldly power without ambition? Superstition without a natural principle of religiousness in the heart of man? Such a system may be a vast fact in the economy of divine government considered as a judgment, as Mahommedanism: or a subtler corruption, as Popery, pregnant with greater mischiefs; but where the enemy of souls has not been permitted to blot out in the same way the great facts of Christianity, as to the manner of the Divine existence and incarnation, nor the historical truths of the gospel: or it may be a marring where, in the main, truth abides: or it may be the ruin of some special testimony of God as far as it goes. A testimony of some special truth may decay, or be lost, or lose its power by becoming mere established orthodoxy: but I do not call this directly, or properly, a work of Satan. I call it a work of Satan when, blessing and testimony having been brought in by the blessed Spirit of God, a systematic effort is made, producing a regular system:—an effort which takes up the truth whose power has decayed, as to faith really carrying the soul out of the influence of present things, or some neglected truth generally, and while it seems to adopt it as it stands in its basis as a fact, subverts and sets it aside:—throws the soul back on ground which is no longer a test of faith, though it be truth, (for there Satan can adopt truth for a time) and brings in apparent additional instruction:—but really
