In our members there is a slumbering inclination towards desire which is both sudden and fierce. … It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity, or desire for revenge … Joy in God is in course of being extinguished in us and we seek all our joy in the creature.  At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real; the only reality is the devil.  Satan does not here fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Delivered at Finkenwalde reunion, April, 1937.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Temptation (London: SCM Press, 1963), 33.