ountain of the
Good. It is a shallow life that strikes that antagonism of God and
Satan out of itself. And though the belief in a personal tempter has
got to be very unfashionable nowadays, I am going to venture to say
that you may measure accurately the vitality and depth of a man's
religion by the emphasis with which he grasps the thought of that
great antagonism. There is a star of light, and there is a star of
darkness; and they revolve, as it were, round one centre.

But whilst, on the one hand, our Christianity is made shallow in
proportion as we ignore this solemn reality, on the other hand, it is
sometimes paralysed and perverted by our misunderstanding of it. For,
notice, 'the God of peace shall bruise Satan _under your feet_.'
Yes, it is God that bruises, but He uses our feet to do it. It is God
from whom the power comes, but the power works through us, and we are
neither merely the field, nor merely the prize, of the conflict
between these two, but we ourselves have to put all our pith into the
task of keeping down the flat, speckled head that has the poison
gland in it. 'The God of peace'--blessed be His Name--'shall bruise
Satan under your feet,' but it will need the tension of your muscles,
and the downward force of your heel, if the wriggling reptile is to
be kept under.

Turn, now, to the other thought that is here, the promise and pledge
of victory in the name, the God of peace. I have already referred to
two similar designations of God in the previous chapter, and if we
take them in union with this one in our text, what a wonderfully
beautiful and strengthening threefold view of that divine nature do
we get! 'The God of patience and consolation' is the first of the
linked three. It heads the list, and blessed is it that it does,
because, after all, sorrow makes up a very large proportion of the
experience of us all, and what most men seem to themselves to need
most is a God that will bear their sorrows with them and help them to
bear, and a God that will comfort them. But, supposing that He has
been made known thus as the source of endurance and the God of all
consolation, He becomes 'the God of hope,' for a dark background
flings up a light foreground, and a comforted sorrow patiently
endured is mighty to produce a radiant hope. The rising of the muddy
waters of the Nile makes the heavy crops of 'corn in Egypt.' So the
name 'the God of hope' fitly follows the name 'the God of patience
and consolati