Taylor Caldwell

To denigrate him as a ridiculous figure, and ugly and paltry, is wrong, and does a disservice to God Who can create nothing ugly—only man can do that—and in the belittling of Lucifer there is a great danger. Evil is nothing to belittle, nor the anguish of Evil.

What has virtue to offer in comparison, though virtue is eternal life? Does virtue possess the drama, the violence, the color, the frantic vehemence, the terrible euphoria, the laughter and noise and ecstasies of evil, and yes, the enormous capacity for destruction? Verily, it does not. It is a weariness to man, as You have regretfully observed ten thousand times ten thousand millennia over and over. The desire for wickedness and death is far greater in the breasts of mankind than the desire for innocence and life.

Eight billion

Did He know that you would transgress beyond the boundary that must not be crossed, which is the greatest of sins? We shall never know. Love can destroy as well as evil, and if you were cast from Heaven it was not because of your evil but through your haughty love.

Endless other worlds have sinned and fallen, under my tutelage and suggestion, beautiful vast worlds of blinding color and enormous vistas and splendid cities, and with men who could at least claim to have a wink of intelligence. But He did not choose one of them. He chose the most vulgar, the most animalistic, the muddiest, the dirtiest, the most inarticulate, the least endowed with poetry and comprehension, without mercy and faith and learning. It is not worthy even to be called a latrine or a gutter, this murderer of prophets and heroes, this murderer of God, Himself. This delighter in filth, in sins most abominable and unspeakable, this arrogant little squeak in the song of creation! I have felt some pity for other worlds which have fallen, for they had some splendor and some glory. But for Terra I have only revulsion. Half desert, half storm, half-polluted seas, half-eroded mountains, it is a fit habitation of the creature which reared itself on its hind legs and dared to call itself a man!

But virtue is simple and easily understood. It is only evil that is complex, complicated, twisted in all its ways, and devious. Virtue is a stream of bright water going faithfully to the sea. But evil winds through many passages and gorges and chasms, and it takes on many intricate colors and hides itself in alien caverns.

They came to me, not through august sins which at least possess a measure of grandeur and imagination, but through sins so mean and contemptible that they are below the comprehension of the lowest of creatures on Terra. The serpent in the forest is not as poisonous as man, the rabid bat is not as mad and loathsome, the toothed shark is not so foul a scavenger. For none of these can lie. That is the prerogative of man only. Man always takes on the aspect of the serpent, the bat and the shark, and their habits. He is more dreadful than these, for he lacks their innocence and he knows what he does and he does it with enthusiasm and passion. It is through his lies that man comes to me, his lies of the flesh and the spirit, for untruth is a perversion and man is a pervert. He is the incarnation of the lie which is myself, and all the evil that he does is his corruption of truth.

When God “condemned” man to work He bestowed the next holiest gift after free will. Labor is prayer and achievement, and the uncertainty of the achievement. Beauty is always in the process of becoming, but is never fully attained. Joy is in the next turning, but the next turning promises greater joy. Love is never completely satisfied in Heaven, except for the surety of the Love of God. It strains forever, and happily, after greater fulfillments.

where there is no need there is no desire and no enjoyment

Man reasons, woman conjectures. Therefore, man wearies first. He is always yawning in the very midst of feminine discourse

Nothing is wicked until man makes it so