APPLICATION.
If there be a plurality of devils, Ignorance must be their king; and through his influence only men are wicked; and, under him and his satellites, the wretchedness they have dealt out to mankind ever since their chequered reign began has disfigured the fair face of nature; and they have too often succeeded, in the struggles between virtue and vice, in obscuring the reasoning powers of man, and bringing him down to the level of the brute. For no sooner was it decreed by Omnipotence that his reasoning creatures should live in a state of civilized society, suitable to their natures and befitting so high a behest, than these enemies to this good order of things obtruded themselves upon it, and have too long and too often succeeded in baffling the efforts of good men in their aims at approaching towards perfection, and in thwarting the progress of mental improvement, and the consequent happiness of the human race. They have, with the glimmering light of their ignis fatuus, led their devotees in zig-zag, backward and forward paths, through misty bogs and quagmires, into the midnight glooms and chaotic darkness which envelope their wretched dens. The bloody pages of history have in part recorded some of the many miseries which have from time to time been inflicted upon their victims; but to enumerate only a portion would be an irksome as well as an endless task.