With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded; and Heav'n Gates Pourd out by millions her victorious Bands Pursuing. I upon my Frontieres here Keep

C. S. Lewis was getting at this idea when he wrote, If your thoughts and passions were directly present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality or otherness, how should I distinguish them from mine?…You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without signs of "externality." Yes: and the result is that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both.

The anonymous1 author wrote, "Wherefore play the game of life warily, for your opponent is full of subtlety, and take abundant thought over your moves, for the stake is your soul.

Every unmortified sin will certainly do two things:— [1.] It will weaken the soul, and deprive it of its vigour. [2.] It will darken the soul, and deprive it of its comfort and peace. [1.]

A sin is not mortified when it is only diverted. Simon Magus for a season left his sorceries; but his covetousness and ambition, that set him on work, remained still, and would have been acting another way. Therefore Peter tells him, "I perceive thou art in the gall of bitterness;"—"Notwithstanding

A believer] is oftentimes at the very brink, at the very door of some folly or iniquity, when God puts in by the efficacy of actually assisting grace, and recovers them to an obediential frame of heart again. And this is a peculiar work of Christ, wherein he manifests and exerts his faithfulness toward his own: 'He is able to succor them that are tempted' (Heb. 2:18)....Here lies a great part of the care and faithfulness of Christ toward his poor saints.

If sin be subtle, watchful, strong, and always at work in the business of killing our souls, and we be slothful, negligent, foolish, in proceeding to the ruin thereof, can we expect a comfortable event? There is not a day but sin foils or is foiled, prevails or is prevailed on; and it will be so whilst we live in this world.

When sin lets us alone we may let sin alone; but as sin is never less quiet than when it seems to be most quiet, and its waters are for the most part deep when they are still, so ought our contrivances against it to be vigorous at all times and in all conditions, even where there is least suspicion.

So temptation is like a knife, that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man; it may be his food or his poison, his exercise or his destruction.

for Owen, circumstances—whether amiable or painful—were not an excuse to stop resisting sin.

Temptation is like a knife, that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man; it may be his food or his poison, his exercise or his destruction.

The business in hand being to awake the whole man unto a consideration of the state and condition wherein he is, that he might be brought home to God, instead hereof he sets himself to mortify the sin that galls him, -- which is a pure issue of self-love, to be freed from his trouble, and not at all to the work he is called unto, -- and so is diverted from it.