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The Contrast

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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 7, 1865

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 26, No. 23.

Read the full edition

The Contrast.

By Joseph Clarke

God does, Satan undoes; God creates, Satan destroys; God builds, Satan tears down; God enlightens, Satan darkens the mind.
God gives strength, Satan weakens the body and mind; God is good, Satan is evil; God is righteous and holy, Satan is unrighteous and unholy; God is pure, Satan is vile; God is the Creator, Satan is a created being; God is independent, Satan is dependent.
God delights in conferring happiness, Satan delights in making others miserable; God restores the erring and the wanderer, Satan is in raptures at the success he has in bewildering the lost and straying. God dwells in unapproachable light, amid the hosts of angels, who are ever happy in his presence; Satan is ever in chains of darkness, reserved to his final doom, made more bitter by the hosts of demons that surround him, and all their misery enhanced by the thought that their own pride brought them down from Paradise.
God is happy in his own righteousness, without a stain of injustice upon him; happy in the thought of the happiness and joy his hand confers upon his creatures, who not only in Heaven, but throughout the wide universe, attest to his goodness. Satan is miserable with his millions of sharp goads, which, like so many venomous stings, ply his conscience and render him desperate and raging in his hopeless career.
If Satan is as dependent for his existence as the merest worm, why did God permit him to prolong his rebellion for thousands of years, why permit him to soil the Garden of Eden with his filthy presence, and there make others as miserable as himself?
When Satan fell, he had not yet fully demeaned himself to the lowest scale of wickedness; evil had not yet been developed; angels had not yet witnessed the debasing consequences of sin; sin and disobedience were not yet fully appreciated, even by angels; the influence of sin upon the moral and physical constitution of men and angels had not been witnessed, Satan stood up as yet only as a fallen angel; yet noble and kingly, yet an angel, with strong desires for a restoration to his former home.
Time has fully developed the nature of pride and selfishness, and has manifested the true and unfailing results of sin.
Satan and his angels are no more the noble beings who fell from Heaven, and man is no more the beautiful angelic man as he came from the hands of his Creator.
Everywhere are spread out before us, evidences of his fall; the prison filled with felons too corrupt for innocence to gaze upon; the asylums for deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, and insane; the general lack of benevolent qualities in mankind, and in many branches of the human race the utter ruin of mind and body, all tell the same tale of woe and sin.
With such a monument to the memory of pride and rebellion, the universe will ever be safe when its author and abettor, with his helpers, are all consigned to oblivion. JOSEPH CLARKE.