We leave the subject here to resume it again—for the story of the serpent is yet but half told.
But of one thing we may all be conscious. The origin of evil is still in every soul, the whispering of the serpent to the woman. Self-consciousness is to most people their very life. Our love of sensuous things drags us down to the lowest levels. If we deny God and immortality, it is the delusion of sense. If we hesitate or doubt, it is the delusion of sense. If we cannot grasp spiritual thoughts, it is because we are deluded by sense. If we cannot open our understandings to the light that comes only from on high, it is sense that hinders. And through all our denials and doubts, it is sense and its delusions that rule the soul. It comes to us in many forms, deceives in many ways, but it comes always in hatred of that which is holy. It drowns the soul in dissipation or overwhelms it in pleasures; it elates it with ambition; it makes it in dreams a demi-god. It puts self in the center of its little universe, and causes all things to revolve around it. It bends all activities, all beings, all life, to serve one's personal ends, whether of ambition, pleasure or greed. And what is worse than all, it persuades the soul that this is the only right and proper thing to do, that it has the sanction of religion, and that anything else is superstition. This serpent is the deluding principle of the universe. It
