The imperial corpse drawn by a cart, most of the attendants leaving it in the street because of a fire alarm that they might go off and see the conflagration.  And just as they are going to put his body down in the church which he had built, a man stepping up and saying, “Bishop, the man you praise is a robber.  This church stands on my father’s homestead.  The property on which this church is built is mine.  I reclaim my right.  In the name of Almighty God I forbid you to bury the king here, or to cover him with my glebe.”  “Go up,” said the ambition of William the Conqueror.  “Go up by conquest, go up by throne, go up in the sight of all nations, go up by cruelties.”  But one day God said, “Come down, come down by the way of a miserable death, come down by the way of an ignominious obsequies, come down in the sight of all nations, come clear down, come down forever.”  And you and I see the same thing on a smaller scale many and many a time—­illustrations of the fact that God lets the wicked live that He may make their overthrow the more climacteric.

What is true in regard to sin is true in regard to its author, Satan, called Abaddon, called the Prince of the Power of the Air, called the serpent, called the dragon.  It seems to me any intelligent man must admit that there is a commander-in-chief of all evil.

The Persians called him Ahriman, the Hindus called him Siva.  He was represented on canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and Cerberus and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda.  I do not care what you call him, that monster of evil is abroad, and his one work is destruction.  John Milton almost glorified him by witchery of description, but he is the concentration of all meanness and of all despicability.  My little child, seven years of age, said to her mother one day, “Why don’t God kill the devil at once, and have done with it?” In less terse phrase we have all asked the same question.  The Bible says he is to be imprisoned and he is to be chained down.  Why not heave the old miscreant into his dungeon now?  Does it not seem as if his volume of infamy were complete?  Does it not seem as if the last fifty years would make an appropriate peroration?  No; God will let him go on to the top of all bad endeavor, and then when all the earth and all constellations and galaxies and all the universe are watching, God will hurl him down with a violence and ghastliness enough to persuade five hundred eternities that a rebellion against God must perish.  God will not do it by piecemeal, God will not do it by small skirmish.  He will wait until all the troops are massed, and then some day when in defiant and confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath of hell stalks forth, our champion, the son of David, will strike him down, not with smooth stones from the brook, but with fragments from the Rock of Ages.  But it will not be done until this giant of evil and his holy antagonist come out within full sight of the two