Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal
families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a
war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war
in the history of the race."

"Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and
you must confess that it is wonderful--in its way. We must now exhibit
the future."

He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more
devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.

"You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress. Cain
did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins
and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine
arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added
guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly
improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that
all men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have
remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time."

Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the
human race, although he knew that what he had been saying shamed us and
wounded us. No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering is
nothing to them; they do not know what it is, except by hearsay.

More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to
convert him, and as he had remained silent we had taken his silence as
a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a
disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression
upon him. The thought made us sad, and we knew then how the missionary
must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it
blighted. We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the
time to continue our work.

Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a
remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high
civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world,
then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest
ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did
their best--to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race
and the earliest incident in its history--but only the Christian
civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries
from now it will be reco