Deviltry

“ When it don’t go astray for a long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, because they think it is hatching deviltry. Imagine the Grand Vizier in solemn council with the magnates of the realm, spelling his way through the hated newspaper, and finally delivering his profound decision: “This thing means mischief—it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive—suppress it! ”

“ Though justice would have us assign to any Great Dull his honest dues, it also permits us to pull off from his sable brows any unearned wreaths which Cotton Mather and others credulously placed upon them. It also and especially requires us to tear off from the fair head of guileless Martha Goodwin that badge labeled Fraud and Imposture—that emblem of deviltry—which modern delusion has most cruelly, and yet most artistically, wreathed around temples that seem worthy of a pure martyr’s honoring crown. ”

“ Far to their left coyotes lifted their mocking, plaintive yodel to the Goddess of Darkness, their patron saint, who shielded their stealthy deviltry from the eyes of men. But the blurred lights beckoned the wanderers downward, and they obeyed the signal, slipping over rounded stones, staggering into prickly bushes, sliding over abrupt ledges.
Andrew Jerome followed the trail by instinct, and Dr. Shonto was glad to follow Andy. The youth’s aptitude in the mountains was ever a source of wonder for the doctor, and often he had told the boy that he attributed it to heredity. ”

“ The horrible impress of naked and hardened villany—the light and mirthful delirium of crime—the wanton manifestations of vice, in all its shapes, and the unblushing front of debauchery and profligacy—constituted, when brought together in one hideous group, a sight which made his heart groan for human nature on the one hand, and the corruption of human law on the other. ”

“ He must have established deceivers to mislead them with lies, to terrify them with the wrath of God, in case they stir hand or foot, or so much as a thought, to mend their doleful condition; as if the good God was the sanctifier of all villainy, the patron of the worst of all villains! ”

“ Multitudes of this class pass from the natural into the spiritual world every year. Some of them ultimate their supreme selfishness here, in words and deeds befitting devils—in falsehood, fraud, theft, blasphemy, adultery, murder and other abominations. But some of them are, outwardly, quite respectable people. ”

“ And as self-love is the source of all other evil loves when it reigns supreme, therefore the devils are thoroughly immersed in evil. They are full of hatred, malice, craft and subtlety;—full of falsehood, tyranny, cunning and cruelty. Their life is one of unmitigated selfishness. It is their delight to do all manner of mischief;—to foment hatreds, strifes and divisions;—to stir up envies, jealousies and revenges—to intensify all the worst passions of the human heart;—to blind, and mislead, and if possible make slaves of, all who come within the sphere of their influence. ”

“ It is a true work of the Devil, the fostering of a tyrannical prejudice. Far and wide over space, and long into the future, the winged words of evil counsel will go. In the market-place, in the house, in the theatre, and in the church,—by land and by sea, in all the haunts of men,—their influence will be felt in a perennial growth of hate and scorn, and suffering and resentment. Amongst the sufferers will be many to whom education has given every refined susceptibility that makes contempt and exclusion bitter. ”

“ Every husband, every father, every brother, feared and loathed him as the incarnation of the Evil one—in their mean, narrow, tedious nauseating philosophy they held him as a perjured villain of the deepest dye, steeped in utterest infamy! ”

“ Don't you perceive that whatever goes into the man from outside can't defile him, 7:19 because it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach, then into the latrine, thus making all foods clean?" 7:20 He said, "That which proceeds out of the man, that defiles the man. 7:21 For from within, out of the hearts of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, sexual sins, murders, thefts, 7:22 covetings, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness. 7:23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man." ”

“ For when ye had left us, this evil man gathered around him all outlaws, villeins, and masterless men, until they were come to such a force that they slew and scattered the king's men who went against them. ”

“ Asked the King, "What didst thou observe in them; and did they give thee any charge?" Answered the treasurer, "I found them patient and resigned to what came down upon them and they said to me, 'Verily, our father is excusable; bear him our salutation and say to him, 'Thou art quit of our killing. But we charge thee repeat to him these couplets,
Verily women are devils created for us. We seek refuge with God from the artifice of the devils. They are the source of all the misfortunes that have appeared among mankind in the affairs of the world and of religion. ”

“ He had seen similar evils to those which we have seen and suffered. “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.” ”

“ But what renders your injustice toward the pious still more cruel, is, that it is your own examples, your irregularities, and even your censures, which stagger, weaken, and force them sometimes to imitate you; it is the corruption of your manners which becomes the continual and the most dangerous snare to their innocence; it is those foolish derisions with which you continually assault virtue, that force them reluctantly to shelter themselves under the appearances of guilt. ”

“ And had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we now deem so savage, by which the world was rid of scourges more awful and more potent than the felon with his candid dagger? Fell instigators of the evil in men's secret hearts, shaping into action the vague, half-formed desire, and guiding with agencies impalpable, unseen, their spell-bound instruments of calamity and death. ”

“ The splendor of action, the daring of enterprise, or the glitter of majesty, may seize their imagination, and so drown their judgment, but never is it the tyranny of power, the wantonness of cruelty, the brutality of vice, which they adore, any more than it is the innocence and usefulness of virtue, which they despise. ”

“ Whence it comes to pass, that in their results we have sometimes found the same spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger, the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud, that ever lodged in the breast of any individual. ”

“ There are good and bad among all, and in all professions, but there is also a black spot in most, possibly all hearts, which may be developed to almost any extent, to change the justest, wisest, most moral men into 'human devils.' In reading the old reports and the expressions used by the judges in their summings-up and sentences, it is impossible not to believe that the awful power they possessed, and its constant exercise, had not only produced the inevitable hardening effect, but had made them cruel in the true sense of the word. ”

“ That good may come of evil;
Still every hour, with all our might,
We must resist the devil.
"If horn and hoof be any proof,
And if the foot be riven,
Surely I am the very man
That with the beast has striven!" ”

“ To say nothing of those evils one man brings upon another, as poverty, imprisonment, infamy, dishonesty, racks, snares, treachery, reproaches, actions, deceits—but I'm got into as endless a work as numbering the sands—for what offenses mankind have deserved these things, or what angry god compelled them to be born into such miseries is not my present business. ”

“ When I think of the long catalogue of villany you have been listening to, padre, not only without an effort, but a wish to check; when every sin recorded has figured in your ledger, with its little price annexed; when you have looked out upon the stormy sea of society, as a wrecker ranges his eye over an iron-bound coast in a gale, and thinks of the 'waifs' that soon will be his own ”

“ The vice was the fool of the old moralities or dramas, who was generally engaged in contests with the devil, by whom he was finally carried away. Dr. Johnson says the modern Punch is descended from the vice.
III.131
From a shelf the precious diadem stole,
And put it in his pocket!
In allusion to the usurper procuring the crown as a common pilferer or thief, and not by open villainy that carried danger with it. ”

“ The great mischief-maker, and that is malice. Even where there is no manifest occasion of strife, yet hatred seeks occasion and so stirs it up and does the devil's work. Those are the most spiteful ill-natured people that can be who take a pleasure in setting their neighbours together by the ears, by tale-bearing, evil surmises, and misrepresentations, blowing up the sparks of contention, which had lain buried, into a flame, at which, with an unaccountable pleasure, they warm their hands. ”

“ For what wickedness is there under heaven, which is not found among us at this day? Not to insist on sabbath breaking, thefts, cheating, fraud, extortion, violence, oppression, lying, robberies, sodomies and murders, which with a thousand unnamed villainies are common to us and our neighbour Christians of Holland, France, and Germany,—what a plentiful harvest we have of wickedness almost peculiar to ourselves! ”

“ Who does not know that kings and leaders are sprung from those who—ignorant of God—by pride, plunder, perfidy, murders—in a word by almost every crime, the devil, who is the prince of this world, urging them on as it were—have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption to dominate over their equals ”

“ The sorts of evil which these monsters so uncouthly represent are such as physical suffering, drunkenness, violence, fraud, and the thousand shapes of slavery, personal and political, and of all castes and colors. ”

“ What villanies of every kind are committed day by day; yea, too often with impunity, by those who sin with a high hand, and glory in their shame? Who can reckon up the oaths, curses, profaneness, blasphemies, the lying, slandering, evil-speaking, the sabbath-breaking, gluttony, drunkenness, revenge, the whoredoms, adulteries, and various uncleanness, the frauds, injustice, oppression, extortion, which overspread our land as a flood? ”

“ This long representation of the wickedness of the wicked, is here summed up in the first words of it, (v. 2.) The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor; where two things are laid to their charge, pride and persecution; the former the cause of the latter. Proud men will have all about them to be of their mind, of their religion, to say as they say, to submit to their dominion, and acquiesce in their dictates; and those that either eclipse them, or will not yield to them, they malign, and hate with an inveterate hatred. Tyranny, both in state and church, owes its original to pride. ”

“ Some notoriously wilful sinners are like this madman; all are herein like the horse and the mule, that they need to be held in with bit and bridle; but some are like the wild ass, that will not be so held. The commands and curses of the law are as chains and fetters, to restrain sinners from their wicked courses; but they break those bands in sunder, and it is an evidence of the power of the devil in them. ”

“ Whereas it is said all malice, all guile, learn, That one sin, not laid aside, will hinder our spiritual profit and everlasting welfare. (4.) Malice, envy, hatred, hypocrisy, and evil-speaking, generally go together. Evil-speaking is a sign that malice and guile lie in the heart ”

“ Never has there been such a gigantic evil in the commonwealth, or one which has affected greater numbers or caused more numerous crimes. Whatever instances of lust, treachery, or crime have occurred during these last years, have originated, you may be perfectly certain, in that shrine of unhallowed rites. ”

“ Among these were pride, and oppression, and envy, and malice, and revenge, and covetousness, and secret vanity of mind, and evil thoughts of all sorts, and all sinful wishes and desires. When covetousness, indeed, put men on committing robbery, or when malice drove them to acts of murder, then the common courts immediately judged the criminal, without waiting for these great assizes ”

“ These evil works are the nets, snares, fetters, blocks, chains, bonds, and imprisonments, with which the prince of this world, the devil, who works in the children of disobedience holds men captive, blinded and bound at his will. ”

“ Whether you examine the conduct of the nation at large, or that of its chiefs and leaders, your feelings revolt at the one, and your integrity despises the other. You see the idols erected by Folly, degraded by Caprice;—the authority obtained by Intrigue, bartered by Profligacy;—and the perfidy and corruption of one side so balanced by the barbarity and levity of the other, that the mind, unable to decide on the preference of contending vices, is obliged to find repose, though with regret and disgust, in acknowledging the general depravity. ”

“ The desperately wicked never see their own moral deformity. Their eyes are blinded out of tenderest mercy toward them; for to see themselves as they appear in the light of heaven, would cause them unutterable agony. Take any class of the most hardened villains you can find—those of a character nearest allied to that of devils, such as gamblers, thieves, swindlers, murderers, fornicators, pimps, pirates—does any one imagine that these people see themselves to be the dreadful creatures they really are? ”

“ That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, to excite and animate themselves in it, the prince asketh, and the judge asketh, for a reward, for a bribe, with which they well be hired to exert all their power for the supporting and carrying on of any wicked design with both hands. They do evil with both hands well (so some read it) ; they do evil with a great deal of art and dexterity; they praise themselves for doing it so well. ”