The Devil Always Steps on His Own Tail

One of the basic lessons of the Gospel is that you cannot defeat the devil in your human strength. Rather, God seems to love to allow the devil to defeat himself. So Old Scratch puts it into the heart of Judas to betray Jesus—only to have the crucifixion and resurrection deal the decisive blow to the powers of hell. In the same way, Old Goat Legs (who is incorrigibly unteachable due to his stupid pride) repeats the same monotonous pattern in the lives of the martyrs. Like the ham-fisted bully whose only thought is, “If force fails, use more force!” Satan and his fellow demons just keep doing the same thing over and over: trying to smash goodness and shout down truth, only serving to make both spread far and wide. He is like an idiot who kicks dandelions in his fury at their having gone to seed.

Case in point: A pro-life organization had a billboard put up on a building in the SoHo district of lower Manhattan. Pro-abortion people protested. As a result, the billboard, which otherwise would have been seen only by people in or passing through SoHo was seen by millions of other people.  Newspapers had photographs of the billboard in their stories about the protests and television news programs also showed it in their coverage of the complaints.

Not without reason did medievals chuckle that the devil was a jackass. His intellect is vastly superior to ours, but so radically perverted that God, in his simplicity, always outfoxes him.