nce.

The Great Outside Hindrance

<u>The Traitor Prince.</u>

There remains yet a word to be said about hindrances. It is a most
important word; indeed the climactic word. What has been said is simply
clearing the way for what is yet to be said. A very strange phase of
prayer must be considered here. Strange only because not familiar. Yet
though strange it contains the whole heart of the question. Here lies the
fight of the fight. One marvels that so little is said of it. For if there
were clear understanding here, and then faithful practicing, there would
be mightier defeats and victories: defeats for the foe; victories for our
rightful prince, Jesus.

The intense fact is this: _Satan has the power to hold the answer
back--for awhile; to delay the result--for a time_. He has not the power
to hold it back finally, _if_ some one understands and prays with quiet,
steady persistence. The real pitch of prayer therefore is Satanward.

Our generation has pretty much left this individual Satan out. It is
partly excusable perhaps. The conceptions of Satan and his hosts and
surroundings made classical by such as Dante and Milton and Dore have
done much to befog the air. Almost universally they have been taken
literally whether so meant or not. One familiar with Satan's
characteristics can easily imagine his cunning finger in that. He is
willing even to be caricatured, or to be left out of reckoning, if so he
may tighten his grip.

These suggestions of horns and hoofs, of forked tail and all the rest of
it seek to give material form to this being. They are grotesque to an
extreme, and therefore caricatures. A caricature so disproportions and
exaggerates as to make hideous or ridiculous. In our day when every
foundation of knowledge is being examined there has been a natural but
unthinking turning away from the very being of Satan through these
representations of him. Yet where there is a caricature there must be a
true. To revolt from the true, hidden by a caricature, in revolting from
the caricature is easy, but is certainly bad. It is always bad to have the
truth hid from our eyes.

It is refreshing and fascinating to turn from these classical caricatures
to the scriptural conception of Satan. In this Book he is a being of great
beauty of person, of great dignity of position even yet, endowed with most
remarkable intellectual powers, a prince, at the head of a most
remarkable, compact organization which he