ong all religious in the world, even among the most brutish and
barbarous savages.

I endeavoured to clear up this fraud to my man Friday; and told him,
that the pretence of their old men going up to the mountains to say O!
to their god Benamuckee, was a cheat; and their bringing word from
thence what he said, was much more so; that if they met with any answer,
or spoke with any one there, it must be with an evil spirit: and then I
entered into a long discourse with him about the devil, the original of
him, his rebellion against God, his enmity to man, the reason of it, his
setting himself up in the dark parts of the world to be worshipped
instead of God, and as God, and the many stratagems he made use of, to
delude mankind to their ruin; how he had a secret access to our passions
and to our affections, to adapt his snares so to our inclinations, as to
cause us even to be our own tempters, and to run upon our own
destruction by our own choice.

I found it was not so easy to imprint right notions in his mind about
the devil, as it was about the being of a God: nature assisted all my
arguments to evidence to him even the necessity of a great First Cause,
and over-ruling governing Power, a secret directing Providence, and of
the equity and justice of paying homage to Him that made us, and the
like: but there appeared nothing of all this in the notion of an evil
spirit, of his original, his being, his nature, and, above all, of his
inclination to do evil, and to draw us in to do so too: and the poor
creature puzzled me once in such a manner, by a question merely natural
and innocent, that I scarce knew what to say to him. I had been talking
a great deal to him of the power of God, his omnipotence, his dreadful
aversion to sin, his being a consuming fire to the workers of iniquity;
how, as he had made as all, he could destroy us, and all the world, in
a moment; and he listened with great seriousness to me all the while.

After this, I had been telling; him how the devil was God's enemy in the
hearts of men, and used all his malice and skill to defeat the good
designs of Providence, and to ruin the kingdom of Christ in the world,
and the like: "Well," says Friday, "but you say God is so strong, so
great, is he not much strong, much might, as the devil?"--"Yes, yes,"
said I, Friday, "God is stronger than the devil, God is above the devil,
and therefore we pray to God to tread him under our feet, and enable us
to resist his t