Our generation has pretty much left this individual Satan out. It is
partly excusable perhaps. The conceptions of Satan and his hosts and
surroundings made classical by such as Dante and Milton and Doré have
done much to befog the air. Almost universally they have been taken
literally whether so meant or not. One familiar with Satan's
characteristics can easily imagine his cunning finger in that. He is
willing even to be caricatured, or to be left out of reckoning, if so he
may tighten his grip.

These suggestions of horns and hoofs, of forked tail and all the rest of
it seek to give material form to this being. They are grotesque to an
extreme, and therefore caricatures. A caricature so disproportions and
exaggerates as to make hideous or ridiculous. In our day when every
foundation of knowledge is being examined there has been a natural but
unthinking turning away from the very being of Satan through these
representations of him. Yet where there is a caricature there must be a
true. To revolt from the true, hidden by a caricature, in revolting from
the caricature is easy, but is certainly bad. It is always bad to have the
truth hid from our eyes.

It is refreshing and fascinating to turn from these classical caricatures
to the scriptural conception of Satan. In this Book he is a being of great
beauty of person, of great dignity of position even yet, endowed with most
remarkable intellectual powers, a prince, at the head of a most
remarkable, compact organization which he has wielded with phenomenal
skill and success in furthering his ambitious purposes.

And he is not chained yet. I remember a conversation with a young
clergyman one Monday morning in the reading-room of a Young Men's
Christian Association. It was in a certain mining town in the southwest,