I would not say it, unless I had taught him this; for then I should be speaking the Devil’s words, and doing the Devil’s work:  for these are the thoughts of which he always takes advantage, whenever he finds them in men’s hearts; because he is the enemy who hates men, and the avenger who punishes them for their bad thoughts, by leading them on into dark and fearful deeds; because he is the Devil, the Slanderer, as his name means, and slanders God to men, and tries always to make them believe that God does not care for men, and grudges them blessings; in order that he may make men dread God, and shrink from Him into their own pride, or their own carnal lusts and fancies.

These are the thoughts of which the Devil took advantage in the heathen in old times, and tempted them to forget God—­God, who had not left Himself without a witness, in that He gave them rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness—­God, whose unseen glory, even His eternal power and Godhead, may be clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood from the things which are made—­God, in whom, as St. Paul told the heathen, they lived and moved, and had their being, and were the offspring of God.  This—­that man is the offspring of God, and has a Father in heaven—­is the great truth which the Devil has been trying to hide from men in every age, and by a hundred different devices.  By making them forget this, he tempted them to worship the creature instead of the Creator; to pray to sun and moon and stars, to send them fair weather, good crops, prosperous fortune:  to look up to the heaven above them, and down to the earth beneath their feet, in slavish dread and anxiety:  and pray to the sun, not to blast them to the seas, not to sweep them away; to the rivers and springs, not to let them perish from drought; to earthquakes, not to swallow them up; ay, even to try to appease those dark fierce powers, with whom they thought the great awful world was filled, by cruel sacrifices of human beings; so that they offered their sons and their daughters to devils, and burned their own children in the fire to Moloch, the cruel angry Fire King, whom they fancied was lord of the earthquakes and the burning mountains.  So did the Canaanites of old, and so did the Jews after them; whensoever they had forgotten that God was their Father, who had bought them, and that the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, throughout heaven and earth, were His, then at once they began to be afraid of heaven and earth, and worshipped Baalim, and Astaroth, and the Host of Heaven, which were the sun and moon and stars, and Moloch the Fire King, and Thammuz the Lord of the Spring-time, and with forms of worship which showed plainly enough, either by their cruelty or their filthy profligacy, who was the author of them, and that man, when he forgets that heaven and earth belong to his Father, is in danger of becoming a slave to his own lowest lusts and passions.