Bible temperance.

Date:
[1880?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Bible temperance. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BIBLE TEMPERANCE. I.-ORIGIN OF THE WAR ON EARTH BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL. On the side of Hslt On the side of Heaven — Combatants :—God au • all His l yul subjects ; Satan and all fallen sp Motives:— Love; - - • - - - Hate. Armory :— Truth in all its aspects ; - - Falsehood in e^ery form. 0D is a Spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him vx in spirit and in truth (John iv. 24).” God thinks, speaks, and acts according to His own sovereign will, which is always holy, and just, and good. In the exercise of that sovereign will, it has pleased Him, in various periods of the past eternity, to create innumerable spirits, angels and souls of men, in His own image and likeness. Each spirit has been endowed by Him with various capacities or powers of thought, word, and action, under the guidance and control of a sepa¬ rate, independent ,free will of its own, but each always bound by both duty-and interest to exercise that free will only in harmony with the sovereign will of God, which constitutes the universal, immutable, inflexible law. Any violation of the Divine will or law by any spirit is sin, which inevitably incurs degradation and punishment. At some remote period of the past unknown to man, a vast multitude of spirits in heaven, under the leadership of an archangel now called Satan or the Devil, moved by discontent, envy, or pride, rebelled against the will of the benign Greator; and, because of their rebellion and sin, they were cast out of heaven into a place of punishment prepared for them, called hell. The facts of this rebellion, expulsion, and punish¬ ment, as indicated throughout the Sacred Scriptures, are more fully, vividly, dramatically, and, we believe, truthfully portrayed in Milton’s Paradise Lost, than in any other human composition. These hosts of outcast spirits, though expelled from heaven, are not yet finally confined in hell. Under their mighty leader, they are in possession of their great intellectual powers, their original freedom of will, and much liberty of action throughout the universe of God, outside heaven. But all their originally pure and lofty faculties arc utterly perverted : theirlove is transformed into hate, their truth into deceit, their nobility into meanness. Tli§ all-absorbing aim and object of their fallen existence are to make war upon the throne of Jehovah, to overthrow His dominion and undermine His authority, by all means within their power, in every sphere of operation open to them. Their unceasing effort is to seduce as many unfallen spirits as possible away from loyalty to the Divine will or law, into their own rebellious, miser¬ able ranks. “ Evil, be thou my goo^l! ” is ihe motto of each of them, from Satan, their prince, downwards. In the prosecution of their ignoble work about 6,000 years ago, when our first parents, Adam and