ceaseless distractions, irreconcilable contradictions, disquieting doubts, discouraging outlooks, inharmonious and jangling opinions, unaccountable delusions, clashing and crashing dissonances, cruel hatreds, bitter enmities and stormful convulsions, which so largely enter and deface the course of human history, proceed mainly from his influence.  We know that “the heart of a lost angel is in the earth,” and as we know its throbbings carry misery and despair to millions of our fellow-beings, we can surmise the intensity of we wherewith it afflicts himself.  Mrs. Browning’s Adam thus addresses Lucifer:—­

                          “The prodigy
  Of thy vast brows and melancholy eyes,
  Which comprehend the heights of some great fall. 
  I think that thou hast one day worn a crown
  Under the eyes of God.”

But now the vast brow must wear a heavier gloom, and the eyes betray a deeper sorrow, as in his ruin he has sought to bury the hopes and joys of a weaker race.  How different his dealings with the race from those which mark the ministry of Christ!  Immortal hate on the one side of humanity; immortal love on the other; both struggling for supremacy.  One sweeping across the soul with pinions of dark doubts and fears; the other, with the strong wing of hope and fair anticipations.  One seeking to plunge the earth-spirit into the abysmal depths of eternal darkness; the other seeking to bear it to the apex of light, where reigns eternal day.  And of the two, Christ alone is called “the blest.”  In the agony and anguish of His sufferings He yet can exclaim, “My joy I leave with thee”; and in the lowest vale of His shame can calmly discourse on peace.  The reason?  Do you ask the question?  It is found in His goodness.  He is good, and seeks the good of all; and goodness crowns His lacerated brow with joy.  This Satan sacrificed in his fall; this he antagonizes with, in his dreary career, and so remains in the eyes of all ages the monument of melancholy gloom.  Thus, also, is it with man, whose haughtiness thrusts him into evil.  He is morose and wretched, crusht beneath a burden of we, which weighs the eyelids down with weariness and the heart with care, and which constrains him to curse the hour of his birth.  Next to the grief-crowned angel, there is no more pitiable object in all God’s fair creation than a human soul tumbled by its own besotted pride into sin and shame.  “How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed!” aye, changed to dross, which the foot spurns, and which the whirlwind scatters to the midnight region of eternity.