one step too far, the snake loses its temper, gives one tiny scratch upon
the lip or finger, and that scratch is certain death. That would be a
temptation indeed; one all the more dangerous because there is, I am
told, another sort of coral snake perfectly harmless, which is so exactly
like the deadly one, that no child, and few grown people, can know them
apart.

Even so it is with our worst temptations. They look sometimes so exactly
like what is good and noble and useful and religious, that we mistake the
evil for the good, and play with it till it stings us, and we find out
too late that the wages of sin are death. Thus religious people, just
because they are religious, are apt to be specially tempted to mistake
evil for good, to do something specially wrong, when they think they are
doing something specially right, and so give occasion to the enemies of
the Lord to blaspheme; till, as a hard and experienced man of the world
once said: "Whenever I hear a man talking of his conscience, I know that
he is going to do something particularly foolish; whenever I hear of a
man talking of his duty, I know that he is going to do something
particularly cruel."

Do I say this to frighten you away from being religious? God forbid.
Better to be religious and to fear and love God, though you were tempted
by all the devils out of the pit, than to be irreligious and a mere
animal, and be tempted only by your own carnal nature, as the animals
are. Better to be tempted, like the hermits of old, and even to fall and
rise again, singing, "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy, when I fall I
shall arise;" than to live the life of the flesh, "like a beast with
lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains." It is the price a man
must pay for hungering and thirsting after righteousness, for longing to
be a child of God in spirit and in truth. "The devil," says a wise man