Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES TO THE PROLOGUE WHY SATAN? I Why have I chosen Satan for my spokesman in a discussion of what is, or is not, right ? Seeking in the bottom of my heart, I think the answer might be: Because I am sick of hearing this war discussed from the point of view of God, as if the speaker or writer, English, French, German, American, or what not, held a brief from on high to
justify the ways of God to man
or rather to identify the ways of his own particular nation with the ways of God. I do not know who or what God is; but in these five years he has been called upon to back so many abominations and imbecilities, that it seems more decent not to take his name once more in vain, but rather speak of Evil in that of him who had the gentlemanly frankness to say to it Be thou my Good. If right and wrong are to be discussed in war-time, yet with tolerable manners, it is as well to start from Evil as a great Reality, sub specie ceternitatis; as an Archangel immanent in the Universe, not a little brimstone-stinking devil whom, like the witnesses at witch trials, we see issuing out of the mouth of people we dislike, and they, of course, see issuing out of ours. Besides, I am aware that it has not been from contemplating the lives of saints and sages that I have come by such notions of right and wrong as I possess; but rather from an occasional glimpse of Satan; and during these last years from a daily and hourly exhibition of the Waster. So it is natural and fitting that whatever these years have taught me on this subject should be set forth by a Puppet-Satan of my making, and from the point of view of this Satan’s likings and dislikings. HELL’S PAVING STONES Proverbial wisdom has long recognized the occasional use to which Satan puts virtue. But the good intention…
