Satan must have been pretty simple, even
according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a
high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship
him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the
Son of God, already owned the world; and, besides, what Satan showed him
was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one
should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company,
with a gallon of kerosene."
He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that
hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons
always exactly on schedule time. "The Great Law" was a phrase often on
his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of
color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the Great
Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations throughout
all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but
only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for preservation:
From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong &
misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human
blessedness.
No "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions
by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures.
CCLXIV
CITIZEN AND FARMER
The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily.
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