In like manner, evil spirits will not only endeavour to substitute their own workings in a man's life in the place of God, on the ground of the believer's misconception of the true way of co-acting with God; but they will also seek to substitute their workings for all the mental faculties of the man, i.e., the mind, the reason, the memory, the imagination, the judgment. This is a counterfeit of self through substitution. The person thinks it is himself all the time.
This substitution by evil spirits of themselves on the ground of the passive surrender to non-use of any part of the inner, or outer, life of the believer, is the basis of deep deception and possession among the most "surrendered" children of God; the deception and possession taking an entirely spiritual form at first, such as the man having an exaggerated sense of his importance in the Church, his "world-wide ministry," his lofty position of influence arising out of his "divine commission," his abnormal height of spirituality, and definite and almost unprecedented "experience," which makes him feel he has been placed far above other men. But a tremendous and inevitable fall awaits such an one. He ascends his pinnacle, pushed by the enemy, without any power whatsoever to control the inevitable descent, which must follow when he is undeceived, a crash being the result, shaking the things that can be shaken. Then he experiences awful darkness, and the effects of possession in its true results. The effect of demon possession in its fullest climax is darkness; nothing but darkness; darkness within, darkness without; intense darkness; darkness over the past; darkness enveloping the future. Darkness surrounding God and all His ways.
Here many sink under the horror that they have committed the "unpardonable sin." Some, however, discover that their bitter experience may be turned into light for the Church in its fight with sin and Satan, and as those who have been in the camp of the enemy and heard all his secrets, they become a terror to the forces of evil on their emergence to liberty, with the result that they are assailed with intensified malignity on account of their knowledge of the foe.
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