between professed Christians and the ungodly is
now hardly distinguishable. Church-members love what the world loves, and
are ready to join with them; and Satan determines to unite them in one
body, and thus strengthen his cause by sweeping all into the ranks of
Spiritualism. Papists, who boast of miracles as a certain sign of the true
church, will be readily deceived by this wonder-working power; and
Protestants, having cast away the shield of truth, will also be deluded.
Papists, Protestants, and worldlings will alike accept the form of
godliness without the power, and they will see in this union a grand
movement for the conversion of the world, and the ushering in of the
long-expected millennium.

Through Spiritualism, Satan appears as a benefactor of the race, healing
the diseases of the people, and professing to present a new and more
exalted system of religious faith; but at the same time he works as a
destroyer. His temptations are leading multitudes to ruin. Intemperance
dethrones reason; sensual indulgence, strife, and bloodshed follow. Satan
delights in war; for it excites the worst passions of the soul, and then
sweeps into eternity its victims steeped in vice and blood. It is his
object to incite the nations to war against one another; for he can thus
divert the minds of the people from the work of preparation to stand in
the day of God.

Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of unprepared
souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and he
uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows. When he
was suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks and herds, servants,
houses, children, were swept away, one trouble succeeding another as in a
moment. It is God that shields His creatures, and hedges them in from the
power of the destroyer. But the Christian world have shown contempt for
the law of Jehovah; and the Lord will do just what He has declared that He
would,--He will withdraw His blessings from the earth, and remove His
protecting care from those who are rebelling against His law, and teaching
and forcing others to do the same. Satan has control of all whom God does
not especially guard. He will favor and prosper some, in order to further
his own designs; and he will bring trouble upon others, and lead men to
believe that it is God who is afflicting them.

While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal
all their maladies