Precious remedies against Satan's devices

I started reading this morning the Puritan Thomas Brooks's "Precious remedies against Satan's devices."

Here are a few select passages from Brooks's introduction:

"Christ, the Scripture, your own hearts, and Satan's devices, are the four prime things that should be first and most studied and searched. If any cast off the study of these, they cannot be safe here, nor happy hereafter."

"Beloved, Satan being fallen from light to darkness, from felicity to misery, from heaven to hell, from an angel to a devil, is so full of malice and envy that he will leave no means unattempted, whereby he may make all others eternally miserable with himself...whatever sin the heart of man is most prone to, that the devil will help forward. If David be proud of his people, Satan will provoke him to number them, that he may be yet prouder (II Sam. 24)."

"Reason 1" for Brooks's writing of this treatise: "Because Satan hath a greater influence upon men, and higher advantage over them than they think he hath, and the knowledge of his high advantage is the highway to disappoint him, and to render the soul strong in resisting, and happy in conquering."

"Remember, it is not hasty reading, but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee's touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choisest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian. Know that it is not the knowing, nor the talking, nor the reading man, but the doing man, that at last will be found the happiest man. 'If you know these things, blessed and happy are you if you do them.'"(John 13:17)

Blessings,
Steve