January 10

Second Week in Advent.—Tuesday

I hate vain thoughts: but Thy law do I love. Psalms 119:113.

WE may fly to holy meditation as the great remedy of evil thoughts. Satan is ever seeking to defile our souls by casting in evil desires and ideas. As the birds would have destroyed the sacrifice of Abraham, as the tares of the parable which Satan sowed lessened the fruitfulness and destroyed the purity of the field of wheat, so sinful thoughts are continually sent us by the Evil One to destroy the sacrifice of our hearts and to blot out our good works with sin. Certainly the first help against an evil thought is prayer, quiet, short, earnest prayer to Christ to beat down Satan under our feet. But we must do more. The parable of the unclean spirits teaches us this great truth, that we can only supplant sin by holiness. The man's heart was empty, and so the evil spirit came back, and seven others more wicked than himself came with him. When we cast out a sinful thought we must fill our souls at once with a holy meditation, or else the sin will come back again, and finding room for itself, will lodge there and draw after it other worse imaginations and fouler visions of evil. The Psalmist not only flies the sinful thought but hastens to the holy.

We bear a world about us—aye on wing, And with us, and to which this sky-roofed cell, This strange material ball, is but a thing Of walking shadows: with us doth it dwell, Th' undying spirit's world invisible.

Still travelling onward, onward travelling, Its own horizon round it gathering, It climbs the stair to heaven's high citadel; It hath its clouds, it hath its dews from high, It hath its moon and darkness; a wild world Mounting to join the chain of harmony, Around the sun that lights eternity.