Notice the characteristics of her power as a tempter.

1.  She is regarded as God’s best gift to man.  She fills a place in man’s heart which is empty without her.  It is difficult to think of her as an ally of Satan.  We prefer to think of her as God’s first and best gift to man.  Even a fallen woman is regarded as a poor unfortunate, and is tolerated because the many claim she has been more sinned against than sinning.  Excuses are woven for her, out of the statements ever afloat, that she was in a starving condition, and was driven to desperation; that she was turned out upon the world, was deceived, led astray, and shipwrecked, and then did not care, and so went from bad to worse, until she became the wreck of her former self, and was given up to lust and the pollutions of shame.  God forbid that we should cast stones at her.  In the words of Christ, let us rather say to every fallen woman, “Go, and sin no more.”  But when a woman persists in sinning, we should speak of her in the language of Scripture, and boldly warn against her wiles.

A fallen woman is not God’s gift to man.  Before her fall she was God’s gift.  In beauty Eve still remains the model.  The artist delights to paint her, and the poet sings her praises.  But in conduct she is a warning.  Scripture pictures her going to Adam, hiding from him the ruin wrought, and pressing to his lips the fruit which carried death.  (Then she was the devil’s gift to a sin-cursed world.) A fallen woman—­a woman who refuses to love Christ and to serve him, who sweeps out into the paths of dissipation and of lust, and becomes a seductive wile—­is the devil’s ally; “for she forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God.  For her house inclineth unto death.  None that go unto her returneth again, neither take they hold of the paths of life.”

Against such a woman God warns us in the thunder tones of wrath, and the picture of her doom is lurid with the glow of the devouring flames, “for her feet go down to death and her steps take hold on hell.”

This is but a single characteristic of her power as a tempter, and we love to think that it is the least employed.  A mind retaining the perception of woman’s worth, shrinks from the idea of linking her name with impurity.  We cherish the hope that she is virtuously inclined, and cannot bear to think that she willingly forsakes the right and casts herself down the steeps of ruin.  Ah, woman, when this is not the case society has a right to cast you off.  It is because of this faith that the good despise the woman who persists in folly, and who secretly tries to seduce the unwary.  God’s judgments seem not too severe, and the language is none too strong, though the denunciation is terrible and the destruction certain.  God makes no apologies for sin.  A fallen woman is an abomination.  Her crimes are terrible.  She is the foe of the home, and the enemy of all that is pure.  Hence she is thrown out upon the rocks, and left there to die, unpitied and unbefriended, without God and without hope in the world.  By every virtuous person she is despised.  Hence, between a virtuous woman and ruin there is a bridged chasm; whoever crosses that bridge leaves hope, and honor, and happiness behind.  Think of the thousands about us going, unprayed for, down to perdition!