ry and modesty. Prudery detects
wrong where no wrong is; the wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in
the objects. There is something of over-sensitiveness and
over-delicacy which shows not innocence, but an inflammable
imagination. And men of the world cannot understand that those
subjects and thoughts which to them are full of torture, can be
harmless, suggesting nothing evil to the pure in heart.

Here however, beware! No sentence of Scripture is more frequently in
the lips of persons who permit themselves much license, than the text,
"To the pure, all things are pure." Yes, all things natural, but not
artificial--scenes which pamper the tastes, which excite the senses.
Innocence feels healthily. To it all nature is pure. But, just as the
dove trembles at the approach of the hawk, and the young calf shudders
at the lion never seen before, so innocence shrinks instinctively from
what is wrong by the same divine instinct. If that which is wrong
seems pure, then the heart is not pure but vitiated. To the right
minded all that is right in the course of this world seems pure.
Abraham, looking forward to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
entreated that it might be averted, and afterwards acquiesced! To the
disordered mind "all things are out of course." This is the spirit
which pervades the whole of the Ecclesiastes. There were two things
which were perpetually suggesting themselves to the mind of Solomon;
the intolerable sameness of this world, and the constant desire for
change. And yet that same world, spread before the serene eye of God,
was pronounced to be all "very good."

This disordered universe is the picture of your own mind. We make a
wilderness by encouraging artificial wants, by creating sensitive and
selfish feelings; then we project everything stamped with the impress
of our own feelings, and we gather the whole of creation into our own
pained being--"the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now." The world you complain of as impure and wrong is
not God's world, but your world; the blight, the dullness, the blank,
are all your own. The light which is in you has become darkness, and
therefore the light itself is dark.

Again, to the pure, all things not only seem pure, but are really so
because they are made such.

1. As regards persons. It is a marvellous thing to see how a pure and
innocent heart purifies all that it approaches. The most