CHAPTER XXVII.

Your animosity against us is incited by demoniacal agency.

THIS is a sufficient reply to the accusation of injury to your religion and divinity, since we cannot be supposed to injure that which we have shewn has no existence. Wherefore we meet the summons to sacrifice with opposition, relying on our knowledge, whereby we are certain who those beings are to whom those services are paid under the profanation of images and the deification of mere names of men.

But some think this madness, because, when we [92] might both sacrifice at the time and get off unhurt, while retaining our own private opinions, we prefer obstinacy to safety. You actually advise us how to cheat you; but we know the quarter from whence such suggestions come, and who stirs up all this animosity against us, and how by the alternate employment of cunning persuasions and harsh threats he labours to dislodge our constancy from its position. It is indeed that spirit of daemoniacal and angelic nature, who opposes us because of our separation from him, and is envious of us because of God's favour, who makes attacks upon us from the position of your minds, which, by his secret instigation, are played upon and incited to all that perversion of judgement and unjust hatred which we began with at the commencement of this treatise. For although the whole force of daemons and spirits of that kind is subject to us, yet, like worthless slaves, they sometimes unite contumacy with their dread, and eagerly desire to injure those whom at other times they fear: for dread itself inspires hatred; besides, their hopeless condition, arising from their being foredoomed, finds meantime some solace in the enjoyment of their malignity during the delay of their punishment. And yet when they are seized they are subdued and succumb to their fate, and they supplicate those, when close at hand, whom they assail, when at a distance. Consequently when, after the manner of rebellious convicts in the prisons or mines or that kind of penal servitude, they break forth against us in whose power they are, being rendered the more [93] desperate by their certainty of being no match for us, we unwillingly resist them as though they were our equals, and we return their attack steadily holding the very position which they assail; and never do we more utterly triumph over them than when we are condemned for the immoveableness of our faith.