Part 6

There are being formed in all walks of life--high and low--associations and alliances, spurred on and incited by extravagant promises--the hook baited according to the fish--which culminates in certain disaster. The pathway of life is strewn with victims of Confidence friends--instead of friends. As in all these subtle and dangerous diversions we believe every trap and scheme are under the direct control and supervision of Satan--playing the rôle of Confidence Man. Many with a natural impulse for pleasure knock, and at once arms are wide open to receive them; lust beckons, and the Broad Way becomes choked with her votaries; covetousness shouts her promises, and the love of money soon burns out every high and holy aspiration. Fame holds the chaplet in full view, and men are ready to exchange heaven in order to have it pressed upon their brow.

But alas, in the end--in the end--"it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." When the curtain falls, too late to recover, we shall be found on eternity's shore, shipwrecked, robbed, ruined--victims of the great seducer. No one but an incarnate devil could stoop to the low plane of Confidence Man in business and social life; but think of what it means: by flattering promises, smiles, and kindness force an entrance into the heart life, and when once in possession, desecrate, prostitute, and destroy. We insist that it takes a devil-possessed man to operate in this particular field, and the world is full of such. We therefore conclude he is the god of this planet, blinding the eyes of his unnumbered victims.

XX

THE TRAPPER

"And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will."--_2 Timothy ii. 26._

"Surely he will deliver thee from the snare of the fowler."--_Psalm xci. 3._

To be a trapper requires something more than setting traps and baiting them. The old trapper returns from a season spent among mountains, rivers, and forests--ladened with valuable furs of every kind: beaver, bear, otter, fox, mink, wildcat, coon, opossum, etc. Remember the animal kingdom is infinite in variety; no two alike. A trap that will catch a beaver will not answer as a bear trap; a coon and a mink are as far removed from each other as a polished American and a native of Madagascar. A coon will not go within a rod of a chain, but have little if any keenness of scent for protection. A rat will not go near an object if the smell of human hands is on it.

Volumes of natural history would be inadequate to give the details of differentiation of the animal kingdom. The old trapper in his log cabin has never read a page of zoölogy, but is far more familiar with the ways of the furry folk than the scientists who write our books on natural history. The trapper is a graduate from the school of Association; he has studied the traits and pranks of the forest inhabitants by observation at close range. He knows just where the mink can be caught, and just how the trap must be baited and concealed; he has the same information about all the rest, and can apply it. Once when a child, we were enraptured until late bedtime by the stories of an old trapper: telling about "the different varmints." Without drawing on his imagination, he could have added many chapters to the tales of "Uncle Remus." The facts about our furry friends are far more interesting than fiction; the trapper knows about these facts.

The Psalmist calls Satan a fowler; one who sets traps for old and young as the fowler sets traps for fowls. How is it done? Leaves and weeds are carefully cleared away, and the trap is skillfully set by a trigger, so that the slightest touch will spring it. The ground is also cleared for several rods leading off in front of the trap; suitable food is scattered under the trap and all along the clean strip of ground. The birds excitedly follow the line of "food"--walking under the trap where it is scattered in abundance. In the scuffle, the trigger is soon touched; behold the trap falls, and they are caught; oh, how they beat their heads against the prison bars until they are covered with blood, but all is over. They are caught in the snare of the fowler.

Every animal and fowl will flee from the approach of danger; the trap must be hid, or in some way made to appear as something harmless; nature has endowed them to seek always self-preservation. With nothing but instinct to guide, they are easily caught by the skill and cunning of man, but never caught in the open; some, however, are more easily caught than others, but they must be trapped.

The Bible teaches that the Devil is a trapper; his snares are set everywhere--they are man traps; no spider ever spun a web more accurately for the moth than Satan's traps to catch men. It requires certain bait and certain traps for each particular animal and bird, but the snares for men are legion. Man has a threefold nature: body, mind, and spirit; each of these have many avenues of approach. As the trapper gains his knowledge of the furry tribe by association, so the Trapper of men, by the application of supernatural powers, in close contact and intimate association through the past millenniums, has become intimately acquainted with man.

There are no facts touching his habitat, food, passions, ambitions, weaknesses, yearnings, etc.--whether in the realm of body, mind or spirit--but the cunning trapper of the pit is more minutely acquainted than man is acquainted with himself.

If guileless and unsuspecting men and women were the only victims, the situation would not be so serious; not that one soul is of more value than another, but the facts are: _no one_ seems to be capable of discovering his hidden snares. The greatest and wisest--Alexanders, Anthonys, Napoleons, kings, sages and philosophers--have been captured by him at his will. What a shudder would go over the race if it could penetrate the veil of mystery and see the traps towards which we are moving; moving on to certain capture, but for Providential oversight and guidance. Domestic traps, political traps, social traps, business traps, religious traps; the location and bait are suited to individual likes and dislikes.

"My soul be on thy guard; ten thousand foes arise."

Our country is just beginning to awake to a system of trapping now being carried on in every city and town, so gigantic and heinous that we are dazed and frightened at its boldness. The great White Slave Traffic is carried on by traps, pure and simple; as carefully planned and skillfully executed as the methods of an old trapper who remains in the primeval forest to supply the fur market. The feelers and tentacles of this human devil-fish are running out in the highways and hedges: the factories, mills, department stores. But the traffic is not confined to the poor, uneducated girls at the ribbon counter or waist factory; girls of culture and experience are caught, but the bait used is very different. When once caught, not one in ten thousand ever escapes.

A being less than a fallen archangel could never have instituted the White Slave Traffic. A man or woman not incarnated by the Devil or some of his minions could never promulgate a system so vile, so inhuman, so hellish, as the traffic of innocent flesh and blood, to be offered and burned on the altars of lust for gain. Compared with the White Slave Traffic, as it is prosecuted by the panderers and procurers, negro slavery, at its worst, the extermination of which the bloodiest war ever fought on this planet was waged, is like the vilest ribaldry ever sung in a den of vice to a Te Deum. Lest we forget--Satan is an expert trapper--the king of trappers.

XXI

THE INCOMPARABLE ARCHER

"Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God.... Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness.... Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked."--_Ephesians vi. 13, 14, 16._

When traps, tricks, seductions, and quackery, temptations, etc., fail, Satan adds victims to his long list by destroying them at long range. While in a mountain peak vision of inspiration Paul sees the enemy as a wrestler, a trickster, a schemer, and even a more dangerous rôle than either: a skilled marksman. By keeping close to God, and keeping ourselves unspotted from the world, we may stay his blighting touch from personal contact; but there seems to be no absolute safety until we are shielded by the "whole armour of God."

There are "evil days," days of visitation and distress, over which no one has control; at such times we may not be conscious of any satanic presence; yet confusion, doubt, fear and anxiety have complete control over mind and heart. These days, and their depressing effect, can only be warded off by the protection of the "whole armour"; for emphasis, Paul mentions it twice in the same paragraph. An armour is a coat of mail covering the body, made so as to be impenetrable to the missile of death. The Apostle does not stop with a partial equipment; the head and feet also must be properly covered. Especially does he emphasize the _shield_--that great polished, concave steel disk, strapped to the left arm, so that a thrust from sword, arrow, or spear can be easily deflected. As it is carried on the arm it can be raised or lowered so as to protect the whole body.

This arrow-protecting shield must be wrought in faith, that mysterious relation which unites the soul with God. The antithesis of Paul's language implies that when Satan makes certain efforts to wound the soul, the shield of faith alone can save. The fight is not ended when we come out victor in a hand to hand conflict, but must next prepare to meet a shower of "fiery darts." A dart is an arrow shot from a bow; a fiery dart is a flaming torch attached to the arrow.

In all ages, until the days of powder and firearms, soldiers were equipped with bow and arrows. Arrowheads were made of steel, and as keen as needles. The battle-axe and broadsword were used when the lines met, but showers of arrows would fall upon the enemy with as much fatality as a round of grape and canister. Often the arrows would be freshly dipped in a deadly poison, and in that case the slightest wound would result in certain death. When a fort or city was being besieged, the arrows would carry a ball of tow, having been saturated in oil; hundreds of these flaming darts would fall on the inside of the fortification and start a general conflagration.

This method was practiced by the American Indians when they could not reach a fort, blockhouse, or stockade because of the white man's gun; these flaming torches, falling in great number, were more to be dreaded than the tomahawk and scalping knife of the savages.

Satan shoots "fiery darts"--arrows--at us; he may come, as he did to the Master, and find nothing in us; our hearts may be clean. But from a source entirely unexpected--here comes a flaming arrow--burning its way into the heart, igniting with hatred and misunderstanding friends and enemies in a manner never dreamed of before. How often the blow comes from the one place least expected, and for that reason all the more deadly. We are guarded in some directions, but over the walls of our stockade the Devil sends his fiery darts, and we are swept away in a satanic conflagration. It requires the "whole armour"--and the shield of faith to quench the flaming arrows from his quiver. He is the world's incomparable archer; when all other methods fail, he shoots us with poisoned, fiery darts.

The mother of Achilles baptized him in the river Styx, making him invulnerable to the weapons of the enemy; she held him by the heel during the baptismal ceremony; the heel only remained untouched by the protecting waters of the fabulous Styx. One of the gods became acquainted with this fact, and shot him to death in the heel, the one vulnerable spot. Again, we repeat, we are not safe without the "whole armour of God," and the "shield of faith." Bear in mind, also, the Incomparable Archer takes a more deliberate aim if it is a shining mark, and exults most when he can lay low in the dust, wounded and disabled, one dowered with unusual capacity for noble service.

XXII

THE FATHER OF LIARS

"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."--_John viii. 44._

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is a handle which fits them all."--_O. W. Holmes._

Satan opened his propaganda with a slanderous lie; this lie was believed by the innocent parents of the race. Simple and modest as this lie seemed to be, it opened a crevice in the moral government of God. Confidence, fellowship, and filial relations were destroyed by the breach. The nature and character of a lie may best be understood, and we can get the estimate God places on it, by carefully studying the damages it wrought. Eden was lost, God's favour lost, peace and plenty lost, innocence lost; humiliation, fear, banishment, toil, sweat, suffering and death took the place of Eden's pristine glories.

Nothing so reveals the depths to which Lucifer had fallen--and his great intelligence, losing none of its acumen, exercised in a way fitting to his depravity of character, as the launching of a lie. He has done nothing since--which more clearly exemplifies the Being our Bible teaches that he is. An egg was laid and a lie was hatched; this lie has gone out spreading at a geometrical progression until the infinitude of God's footstool has felt the discordant jar.

A lie, and the Father of it; think of this tremendous statement. The thought will overwhelm our intelligence. Suppose all the peoples that have lived on the earth were lined up: to simplify matters--consider the billion and a half supposed to be living on the earth to-day; just a small part of the number belongs to civilized, christianized nations. What is the situation? Under all the light of education and moral standards, justice, full and untrammelled, can scarcely be had, because of false swearing. An eminent authority says nine-tenths of the race has a price; this means that only one-tenth will rigidly adhere to the whole truth. How few will swear to their own hurt and change not.

Let us study this gigantic proposition from another view-point: every unregenerated heart is full of deceit. In every unregenerated heart there is a germ of all the sins of the Decalogue; lying is one of the "shall nots." A close student of men will agree with the Apostle Paul, when he said: "I have no confidence in the flesh." Carnality will not swear against its own interests; the status of civilization, whether in religion or morals, does not seem to control this matter. When we consider the falsehood and false swearing which obtain among the _best_ people, socially, financially, and so often religiously, then think of the millions living without moral standards, we can begin to appreciate the amount of lying carried on in this world.

As lying is one of the outputs of carnality, and human selfishness is the tap root of carnality, and selfishness dominates the entire race, with rare exceptions here and there, we can understand how easily and naturally prevarication and lying become efficient tools to further personal interests. We once attended a celebrated criminal case in court; scores of witnesses were summoned on both sides; a bar of attorneys fought desperately every inch of ground. The prosecution covered the case beyond any question to the perfect satisfaction of the jury. And the witnesses were, in the main, both respectable and intelligent.

But behold, when the defense produced their side of the case, the witnesses equally honest looking and intelligent, every point of evidence made by the prosecution was absolutely refuted. A new story was told; a new case from the one just stated. Think of it--on both sides there were eye-witnesses; then every witness on one side or the other perjured themselves--and perhaps all of them on both sides.

So completely has the father of liars woven the spirit of falsehood into the moral fibre of men that a sense of its fearful character is almost obliterated. Men make fortunes, secure positions, are elected to office, destroy rivals, win unsuspecting love, seduce innocence, and subdue kingdoms, by being an obedient offspring of their father, inheriting his disposition and ability to breathe out falsehood. Liars are children of the Devil.

Think of the almost infinite resources for evil: "father of liars" does not fully justify the situation. While it is true he originated the first lie, and the lying spirit has ever widened through the stream of racial propagation; but the clearer interpretation signifies that he is the father of _lies_. "See," he whispers, "the advantages to be gained--don't be white livered--tell it; get the hush money--make the promise--swear you did not see it--tell her how devotedly you love her, etc." Who has not met these insidious pulls on the conscience?

Yes, but he is only acting now as a tempter. Quite true; but when the will gives away, the oath, the promise, the false statement is made under a furious lashing of the conscience. The lie belongs to him; he originated--suggested--formulated it; then literally drew it out with quite as much pain as is felt during the extraction of a tooth by a dentist.

It has been said: "The Devil will leave his own brat on your door-step, then accuse you of being its father." This is an inelegant, though a striking statement of a great truth. When he is unable to bring forth--deliver, etc.--his own conception, he at once charges us of being guilty of the thing conceived: the lie, vile imagination, or whatever it may be, quoting Scripture to prove it: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." "Now," he declares, "you are guilty anyhow; why not enjoy the benefits?" Father of lies; millions of them spawned every day and hour: big lies, little lies, business lies, social lies, political lies, and not a few--religious lies, black lies, white lies, church lies.

XXIII

KINGSHIP OF SATAN

"Wherein in time past ye walked according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience."--_Ephesians ii. 2._

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."--_Ephesians vi. 12._

In a former chapter we discussed the origin of Satan, he being an archangel--Lucifer--a great shining leader of the heavenly hosts; now in his fallen estate he is no less a leader. A writer has said: "He seems to have been the rightful prince of this earth, but he has become the traitor-prince through being untrue to the trust; and the usurper-prince through seeking to retain control of the earth as his own dominion, through deceiving man, to whom the earth's dominion was given, into obeying him, and in utter defiance of God." The angels which kept not their first estate, but went down with his insurrection, are his subjects.

He is superior in all villainies, but the Scriptures call him a King ruling his cohorts, and is the "angel of the bottomless pit." As angel he retains his old title, but as _king_, his relations stand out significantly. As chief Devil--archdemon--the title would imply rather _Primus inter pares_; as commander-in-chief, a general of the highest rank. He is all these things: he gives special oversight to field operations, conducts personally great campaigns, retreats here, advances there, charges yonder--but his real aim is to get this world back under his own control; he would put himself in God's place--drive Him out, dethrone Him, kill Him off, that he might take it all to himself, and rule supremely.

However, he is _king_, and as such he is raised above the rank of leadership and commander. We are already familiar with his rank, but the purpose of this chapter is to show, specifically, that as a king his kingship has a much wider range than the bottomless pit. It is threefold. First, as angel of the bottomless pit, he is king of the _underworld_, the land of shadows, gloom, utter darkness; the land of eternal despair. We must depend upon the _Infernos_, evolved from a burning imagination, in order to get any conception of that region. Fearful as the scenes are, a close reading of the Scriptures will reveal a condition of things so terrible that the things seen by Dante and Virgil are not overdrawn. Over this land of woe and suffering Satan is the unlimited monarch.

Second, he is king of the _upper world_. This statement sounds very strange; it would appear that God is entirely ruled out of His creation. But observe the language: "prince of the power of the air." Just what this means in its fullness no one should dare to be dogmatic, but certainly the language cannot be meaningless words. We can but conclude that Satan, in some measure, controls the forces of the physical world: storms, cyclones, cloud bursts, tidal waves, lightning bolts, earthquakes, etc. Certainly, as a _destroyer_, he uses the agencies of destruction; his business is to fill the world with doubt, fear, distress and suffering.

A man has a little child killed by lightning, and he curses God. Does this not look as if a diabolical schemer was manipulating the affair some way? We must admit his power is permitted, and that proposition forces another to the front. Why does God allow or permit his ravages? We have no answer; the ravages go on. We might ask with just as much reason: "Why doesn't God kill the Devil?" He certainly is able to do it, or at least stop his progress. But He does not; Satan is evidently running at large, filling the world with broken hearts and all the accompanying evils which, otherwise, would not occur.

That we may be able to strengthen our opinion as to the prerogatives of this "prince of the power of the air," let us remember the circumstances of Job's calamities. This case is undoubtedly authentic, and the record says that Satan actually controlled the powers of the air. The servant of Job thought God rained fire on the sheep and burned them, but the whole affair had been turned over to the tormentor. The visitations sent on the faithful man of Uz were not from the hand of God; they were manipulated by his satanic lordship--the Devil. Then a great wind came--possibly a tornado or cyclone--and blew the house down wherein Job's children were enjoying themselves.

Concerning Satan's relation--controlling and directing the forces of nature--we shall not conture a dogmatic position. The definite statements and incidents from the inspired record are significant indeed. Strange things occur: a great vessel loaded with Sunday revellers goes down with scarcely a moment's warning; a tidal wave destroys thousands; an earthquake leaves a city in ruins with fearful loss of life. Does the loving, compassionate Father send these calamities? Would it not be a terrible indictment? But the Bible gives incidents where He did send death-dealing visitations upon the people. Certainly. Many believe that God uses Satan, in his vicious administration, to visit His wrath upon places and people. However, God has given him the title of "prince of the power of the air"--the "wickedness in high places."