"Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." - 1 Peter 5:8.

The reference here would seem to be to the efforts made to intimidate the followers of Christ, by penal enactments, sanguinary edicts, or by popular violence. The early Christians were summoned before magistrates and commanded to renounce the faith they had embraced or had shown themselves ready to embrace, by some unequivocal act of homage to a heathen divinity or to the image of the emperor. Satan made himself as terrible as possible, saying, " Cast away your confidence, or I will tear you limb from limb." But it was not by resisting him that men were devoured; it was by succumbing to him. They that were terrified by his roar, and driven from the obnoxious path, became his prey. Though we have no Roman Emperors to launch against us withering edicts, yet the adversary has not by any means ceased to go about as a roaring lion; he still deals in intimidation. Thousands are hindered from coming out of the world by his monitory roar, which threatens them with the wrath of the world if they have anything to do with the life of faith. Sometimes the consciousness of sin is made the means of producing alarm. The convinced sinner is made to see his sins standing like so many genii of tremendous stature and intolerable wrath along the pathway of redemption. The aim of the adversary, in these loud heart melting roars, is to drown the still small voice of the Spirit of God, so that we may not hear the assurance of divine help and infallible deliverance. The adversary roars now like a lion; but if we meet him, he becomes less and less a lion, and eventually takes to ignominious flight; but the Spirit of God, speaking like a dove, if we refuse to hearken to him, shall finally be heard in a voice louder than ten thousand thunders, shall come to us clothed in all the wrath of the Lamb; and who shall then be able to stand, what heart shall then endure?