What follows is an excerpt from Horatio Bonar’s work, Earth’s Morning: Thoughts on Genesis, which can be found in the public domain.

Let us mark how, in these days of ours, he works, and tempts, and rages:—

He comes as an angel of light, to mislead, yet pretending to lead; to blind, yet professing to open the eye; to obscure and bewilder, yet professing to illuminate and guide. He approaches us with fair words upon his lips: liberality, progress, culture, freedom, expansion, elevation, science, literature, benevolence,—nay, and religion too. He seeks to make his own out of all these; to give the world as much of these as suits his purpose, as much as will make them content without God, and without Christ, and without the Holy Ghost. Nay, he makes use of these,—even of religion itself,—to separate men from the living Jehovah. Nor is it merely images, crucifixes, pictures, statues, altars, and such like, which he substitutes for God, seducing the heart and intoxicating the senses; but the true creed, and the true theology, and the true gospel, he makes use of to gratify the intellect, soothe the conscience, while the soul remains all the while a stranger to God and His Christ. For he does not care how near a man may come to Christ, provided he is not one with Him and in Him. It matters not to him how much of truth a man possess, if he can only make that truth a screen to separate, not a link to unite him and God; a non-conductor, not a conductor of the heavenly life. He knows how to employ the dim religious light of ritualism, the cold frosty rays of rationalism, yes, and even the bright warm light of evangelical sunshine, for drawing off the eye and heart from Him who is the light of the world, the bright and morning Star.

He sets himself against God and the things of God in every way. He can deny the gospel; or he can dilute the gospel; or he can obscure the gospel; or he can neutralize the gospel;—just as suits his purpose, or the persons with whom he has to do. His object in regard to the gospel is to take out of it all that makes it glad tidings to the sinner; and oftentimes this modified or mutilated gospel, which looks so like the real, serves his end best; for it throws men off their guard, making them suppose that they have received Christ’s gospel, even though they have not found in it the good news which it contains.

He rages against the true God,—sometimes openly and coarsely, at other times calmly and politely,—making men believe that he is the friend of the truth, but an enemy to its perversion. Progress, progress, progress, is his watchword now, by means of which he hopes to allure men away from the old anchorages, under the pretext of giving them wider, fuller, more genial teachings. He bids them soar above creeds, catechisms, dogmas, as the dregs of an inferior age, and a lower mental status. He distinguishes, too, between theology and religion, warmly advocating the latter in order to induce men to abandon the former. He rages against the divine accuracy of the Bible, and cunningly subverts its inspiration by elevating every true poet and philosopher to the same inspired position. So successfully has he wrought in disintegrating and undermining the truth, that there is hardly a portion of it left firm. The ground underneath us is hollow; and the crust on which we tread ready to give way, and precipitate us into the abyss of unbelief.

He rages against the Cross of Christ, yet with exceeding subtlety and persuasiveness, seeking to blind men to its true meaning and use. In his enmity against it he instigates some to cut it down, others so to bedaub it with such superstitious ornament that it is the genuine cross no longer. He assails the gospel too, mixing up grace and merit; adding to it or taking from it; persuading some that it is not free, and others that it is so free that none will be lost. He attacks propitiation and sacrifice, propagating the lie that sacrifice is merely self-denial, and that the death of Christ is a sacrifice solely because the highest example of self-abnegation ever exhibited. Thus we find him everywhere assailing truth and vitalizing error, working against the true religion, and inspiring and energizing the false. He is the very life and soul of all anti-Christian unbelief and lawlessness, raising up the many antichrists, and ripening the world for the last great Antichrist about to be revealed in the height of rebellion and pride; as if he would make good to man his promise to the first Adam, ‘Ye shall be as God,’ and to the second Adam, ‘All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me;’ for the Antichrist accepts what the Christ refused, and is crowned as Satan’s king and vicegerent upon earth.

But his time approaches and his day is short. The nations shall muster on Armageddon; the kings of the earth shall combine; all shall worship the beast. But the triumphing of the wicked is short. His doom is sealed; first, in the bottomless pit, and then in the lake of fire.

And what a history! What a career! He comes to his end, and none shall help him. He passes away into captivity, and there is none to sympathize with the captive, mighty and majestic though he be in his chains.

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Bonar, H. (1875). Earth’s Morning: Thoughts on Genesis (pp. 241-243). NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS.

Available Online at: Earth’s Morning: Thoughts on Genesis (eBook) | Monergism