The Personality of Satan.
By Bishop Berry
It is with no cloudy vagueness that the personal existence of the spirit of evil is revealed in Holy Scripture. In history, prophecy, and in parable is the tempter brought before us, and every quality, every action, every attribute which can indicate personality is referred to him in language which cannot be explained away. The records of the old dispensation and the writings of the new, alike reveal to us the existence of the adversary, as a matter of spiritual importance. They depict him as pre-eminent in power among the angels who lost their first estate, and as ever compassing the destruction of the souls of men. We may seek to dispose of the opening chapters of Genesis, where the story of the temptation and the fall occurs, as myths. We may refer to Oriental hyperbole that wierd picture in Job of the accuser of the brethren faulting the Almighty to his face. We may characterize the closing pages of Revelation, telling of the tempter's fall and fate, as but allegory and romance. But there will still remain, scattered through the whole series of Bible books, and appearing in connection with every prominent Bible character or Bible fact, mention of the personal Satan, the foe of God, the foe of man. We, then, are neither wise nor prudent, when we are thus warned of Satan and his wiles, to talk of allegories, or rhetorical personification, or in bolder unbelief to doubt or deny the existence and the power of the chief of the fallen spirits. It were far wiser, in humble acceptation of God's word, to recognize our foe, and to seek the strength with which to contend with him. We need the simple faith coupled with the bold defiance, breathed forth in Luther's life and words and hymns; a spirit, which, in its fearlessness and literal reception of the word of God, would blot his study wall with the hurled inkstand where a mighty imagination had conjured up before him the very form and face of Satan. We need that faith of an earlier day, seen in the old law phrase of the Motherland, where the murderer's indictment reads, "Done by the instigation of the devil;" and where men shuddered as they saw in the pale-faced criminal one who had bartered his soul for the price of revenge. We need this unquestioning reception of God's teaching on this point, from the fact that Scripture and experience combine to teach us that this wily adversary of souls rarely, if ever, assails us in his proper shape of horror, but makes use of other guise in which to entrap us, changing his dark front into the winning shape of an angel of light, or turning even our seeming friends into foes, and using our very heart's desires as lures to win us to our ruin.—Bishop Berry.