perfectly disrelish all lower delights. So your sobriety in abstaining from them shall be still further recompensed with more enjoyment of God, and you shall not lose pleasure by denying yourself the pleasures of earth, but shall change them for those that are unspeakably better and purer. He shall communicate himself unto you, the light of whose countenance feeds and satisfies the glorified spirits that are about his throne. Chapter XIII. Herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men.-Acts xxiv. 16. To set the outward actions right, though with an honest intention, and not so to regard and find out the inward disorder of the heart, whence that in the actions flows, is but to be still putting the index of a clock right with your finger, while it is foul or out of order within, which is a continual business, and does no good. But a purified conscience, a soul renewed and refined in its temper and affections, will make things go right without, in all the duties and acts of our callings. LEIGHTON. A pure heart, and.... a good conscience. A HOUSE is not clean, though all the dust be swept together, if it be still in a corner within doors: a conscience is not clean by having recollected all her sins in the memory, for they may fester there, and gangrene even to desperation, till she have emptied them into the bottomless sea of the blood of Christ Jesus, and the mercy of the Father, by the way of confession. But a house is not clean neither, though the dust be thrown out, if there hang cobwebs about the walls, in how dark corner soever a conscience is not clean, though the sins, brought to our memory by examination, be cast upon God's mercy and the merits of his Son by confession, if there remains in me but a cobweb, a little (but sinful) delight in the memory of those things which I had formerly committed. DONNE. |