Hence we already see
that the full weight of a dogmatic system, explaining, mediating, yet
always in conflict with itself, just as it still for ever occupies us,
was imposed on the first miserable son of man. These contradictions,
which are not strange to human nature, possessed his mind, and could not
be brought to rest, either through the divinely-given gentleness of his
father and brother, or the loving and alleviating co-operation of his
sister-wife. In order to sharpen them to the point of impossibility of
endurance, Satan comes upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit,
who begins by unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously
through all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast,
the present as small and of no account, and the future as full of
foreboding and void of consolation.
"So he turns back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than
before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left it,
the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice, becomes
altogether insupportable.
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