Chapter IV: Satan an Angel of Light

SATAN perceived that it would be convenient and advantageous for him to have two suits of clothes. A suit of flaming, impurpled, and blackish red was his raiment since he instigated the rebellion in heaven: this he wears at home. This is the garment that is emblematic of his wrath and cruelty against El-Shaddai. He transformed himself when he tempted the first Adam, and succeeded in casting him down. The Second Adam knew him, when he required him to obey his command, and worship him instead of the true God. The Second Adam would die, rather than eat bread made out of a stone by the command of Satan.

It was in his flaming, bloody, black-red garb that Satan appeared among the persecutors, both pagan and popish, lighting up the funeral fires of the Martyrs. But he soon found it necessary to have a suit of white, descriptive of his cunning and hypocrisy; and he ordered white garments for his servants also, to wear upon certain occasions, when from home upon his expeditions. He met with reception in his white robe, angel like, in many places where he would not have been received at all in his suit of flaming red-black, in which he took the lead at pastimes, Sabbath plays, in taverns, and horse-races. But in his white robe he had an early admittance into many a cathedral, and he appointed some of his servants to offices there.

He also, in his white suit, found his way into the houses of evangelical dissenters, though they profess to have a book which exhibits his devices. Notwithstanding all the watching that had been at the doors, he rushed in to the communion table, as he had done to the consecrated altar of the cathedral, and sowed discord between the minister and the deacons; and he himself undertook the managing matters between them, seated in his chair and vested in his white robe. He forced many to assume a profession, like tares of the field; and some also of his best beloved servants, who were utterly destitute of the love of Christ and the fear of God, he raised into the pulpit, while they were living in secret sins; but they all had a white robe, as white as the sepulchres of the Pharisees, covering all these things. Satan held these up to deceive before the eye of God, and all the terrors of eternity. To sustain them from fainting, he administered unto them his potions from the pitcher of presumption; and hardened their consciences with the hot iron of hypocrisy, heated in the fire of hell. He taught them to persecute religion in the garb of an angel.

Let us not give room to the devil in his white raiment! When he attempts to destroy the character of a brother, he assumes his white robe, and not his murdering garment, pretending to vindicate the glory of God and the cause of justice, asserting that the cause of religion must be cleared; while all this time envy rankles in his heart, notwithstanding his fair pretences, as when the Jews delivered Jesus to be crucified. It was his white garment that Satan wore in the court of Caiaphas, when he charged the true God with blasphemy. This garb, also, his servant Judas wore, when he displayed such zeal and sympathy for the poor, in the case of the ointment at Bethany. Let us ask grace, that we may be able to recognise the devil in his white raiment, as well as in his old black-red garb. He is not so easily distinguished in his borrowed white, as in his own proper suit. Let us cleanse out hypocrisy. Such is our instruction.