42o BRAND PLUCKED OUT OF THE FIRE
him. And this vision is the key which unlocks the secret of the entire history of the Christian Church. The cause of Christianity is the cause of Christ. He is, and has been throughout, as really involved in all that has been done ; He has throughout been acting as really, though invisibly, as when He taught in the streets of Capernaum. And, even as beneath the outward instrumentality of apostles and preachers we are to trace and appreciate the unseen hand and the inaudible voice, of the high priest of our profession, so in the resistance of the heathen, in the cruelties heaped upon the martyrs, in the slow progress of the faith, we are to feel the presence and energy of the great fallen angel. It is from hell that the opposition comes. As it is Christ from His throne, in the light inaccessible, who animates the souls, and influences the hearts of His saints to do and suffer for His Name's sake, so is it the apostate seraph, from his lurid abode, who stirs up adversaries on every side.
Tj To Luther Satan was no mere influence or principle of evil, but a real personal foe — the prince of the powers of the air, the ruler of this world — against whom he, as a captain of the Lord's host, had to wage a terrible and constant conflict. The Diabolus of Bunyan's Holy War, the Apollyon of the Pilgrims Progress, was to Luther also a mighty adversary of God's saints and of Christ, the Captain of our salvation.
If enemies abound and dangers are thickening, it is the Devil who is leading his hosts of evil against the cause of Christ. If there is a time of quiet and of prosperity, it may only be the craft of the Tempter, to cause want of earnestness and of vigilance.
Always, it is more of the Devil than of the Flesh and the World that Luther appears to speak in his spiritual warfare. It was so in his early struggles with sin and with self-righteousness, and in fighting his way to a position of peace and safety through faith in God's righteousness. It was so in the midst of the grand conflict with the potentates of this world, as when he steadfastly set his face to go to Worms, " though there were as many devils there as tiles on the roofs ! " It was so in the evening of his life, when sickness and feebleness prevented his maintaining more active conflict for the cause of the truth.
It may be that, by dwelling upon the fact of the enmity of the devil and his angels, and allowing the idea of active personal conflict habitually to work in his imagination, Luther came to give an excessive prominence to this Satanic influence. The idea
ZECHARIAH in. i, 2 421
may even have exerted at times a morbid effect upon him ; amounting almost to mental disease, in the eyes of those who knew not the Scriptural ground for his belief, nor understood his spiritual experience. But the charge — that stories of Luther's conflicts are only proofs of a weakly superstitious or a fanatically diseased mind — comes with bad grace from those who not only ridicule all belief in the personal existence and agency of the devil, but who are unable also to understand Luther's belief in the existence and presence of God, in whose sight he ever lived, and wrote, and acted.
3. Satan's accusations were unfortunately true. Joshua could not refute them. He was actually clothed in filthy attire. The devil is generally a liar, but he was not a liar in this particular instance. That which the devil said was perfectly true. It is a grand thing when we are able to face the enemy and say, " You always were a liar, and you are a liar now " ; but it is a terrible thing when we have to say, " The devil himself is speaking the truth for once." Joshua has not a word to say. He is perfectly silent. What can he say ? Suppose he were to deny the charge. All that Satan would have to do would be to point at him with his finger, and say, " Look at these filthy garments." What could Joshua reply ? And when Satan brings his charges against the sinner, what has the sinner to say ? He himself proves that Satan is correct in everything that he says. Woe be unto the man when there is no one to speak up for him and he cannot speak for himself !
Satan stands at his right hand to resist him. In our language we should say that there is a social embodiment of opposition to goodness which that man has made for himself ; he has created an atmosphere about his own life which is blighting to reforming efforts, and there is a social power which stands like a Satan, like an adversary, on his right hand, the hand of action, to paralyse it. Moreover, that sort of life puts itself in communication with great forces of evil, and altogether the man feels that a great overpowering adversary is against him. Before God he feels guilt, but no hope. Now what is there to be said to a man in this condition ? He has no hope for himself, and says that no one who knows him has the least hope that he will ever be different. His garments are filthy, the devil is at his right hand, and God, so far