d to
his obesity. Harvest fields and vineyards going down under the cavalry
hoof. Nations horror-struck. But one day while at the apex of all
observation he is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot
cinder, throwing the king so violently against the pommel of the
saddle that he dies, his son hastening to England to get the crown
before the breath has left his father's body.

The imperial corpse drawn by a cart, most of the attendants leaving it
in the street because of a fire alarm that they might go off and see
the conflagration. And just as they are going to put his body down in
the church which he had built, a man stepping up and saying, "Bishop,
the man you praise is a robber. This church stands on my father's
homestead. The property on which this church is built is mine. I
reclaim my right. In the name of Almighty God I forbid you to bury the
king here, or to cover him with my glebe." "Go up," said the ambition
of William the Conqueror. "Go up by conquest, go up by throne, go up
in the sight of all nations, go up by cruelties." But one day God
said, "Come down, come down by the way of a miserable death, come down
by the way of an ignominious obsequies, come down in the sight of all
nations, come clear down, come down forever." And you and I see the
same thing on a smaller scale many and many a time--illustrations of
the fact that God lets the wicked live that He may make their
overthrow the more climacteric.

What is true in regard to sin is true in regard to its author, Satan,
called Abaddon, called the Prince of the Power of the Air, called the
serpent, called the dragon. It seems to me any intelligent man must
admit that there is a commander-in-chief of all evil.

The Persians called him Ahriman, the Hindus called him Siva. He was
represented on canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and
Cerberus and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda. I do not care
what you call him, that monster of evil is abroad, and his one work is
destruction. John Milton almost glorified him by witchery of
description, but he is the concentration of all meanness and of all
despicability. My little child, seven years of age, said to her mother
one day, "Why don't God kill the devil at once, and have done with
it?" In less terse phrase we have all asked the same question. The
Bible says he is to be imprisoned and he is to be chained down. Why
not heave the old miscreant into his dungeon now? Does it not seem as
if hi