New Starts in Life And Other Sermons Author:Phillips Brooks General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1904 Original Publisher: E.P. Dutton Subjects: Sermons, American Religion / Christianity / Anglican Religion / Christianity / Episcopalian Religion / Sermons / Christian Religion / Christian Ministry / Preaching Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the ori... more »ginal. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. " Then Satan answered the Lord and said, Doth Job serve God for nought ? " -- Job i. 9. This question has all of Satan's disposition in it. For Satan in the Bible is the slanderer. The essence of his wickedness seems always there to lie in his suspiciousness and his refusal to allow anybody any goodness. It is the spirit of simple comprehensive hatred. He hates God and he hates man. He grudges them to one another. He will not let God have satisfaction in man nor man have satisfaction in God if he can help it. He hates goodness and he hates the human soul. He would banish goodness from the earth and he would starve the human soul if he could. We can recognize the true Satanic character of such a disposition. It is genuine, essential wickedness. It is distinctly different from the hot impetuosity of evil into which a soul is carried by some overwhelming provocation or by some apparent personal advantage. It is a hatred of goodness because it is good, and of man because he is man. We shudder at it; we say how terrible it is. And yetthe echoes of it are all around us. Happy is the man who has not felt the echo of it within him. The preference of evil rather than good. The choice of the worse construction of a man's life and action rather than the better. The dislike of thinking good where it is possible to think evil. These are the Satan tempers wherever they appear....« less