The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 590

for the conversion of the world and the ushering in of the long-expected
millennium.
Through spiritualism, Satan appears as a benefactor of the race,
healing the diseases of the people, and professing to present a new and
more exalted system of religious faith; but at the same time he works as a
destroyer. His temptations are leading multitudes to ruin. Intemperance
dethrones reason; sensual indulgence, strife, and bloodshed follow.
Satan delights in war, for it excites the worst passions of the soul and
then sweeps into eternity its victims steeped in vice and blood. It is his
object to incite the nations to war against one another, for he can thus
divert the minds of the people from the work of preparation to stand in
the day of God.
Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of
unprepared souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of
nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as
God allows. When he was suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks
and herds, servants, houses, children, were swept away, one trouble
succeeding another as in a moment. It is God that shields His creatures
and hedges them in from the power of the destroyer. But the Christian
world have shown contempt for the law of Jehovah; and the Lord will
do just what He has declared that He would—He will withdraw His
blessings from the earth and remove His protecting care from those who
are rebelling against His law and teaching and forcing others to do the
same. Satan has control of all whom God does not especially guard. He
will favor and prosper some in order to further his own designs, and he
will bring trouble upon others and lead men to believe that it is God who
is afflicting them.
While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can
heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous
cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In
accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in
fierce

589