it, it has fallen upon some evil thing whose touch is poison.

{95}

III. _Guiding the Imagination_

So likewise with the imagination. Perhaps no human faculty is
responsible for so much sin, and there is a peculiar heinousness in
sins of the imagination. In His mercy God has limited our sphere of
sin. There are certain evils impossible for us because He has withheld
us from the condition necessary for their commission.

Instead, therefore, of being grateful for such a blessed limitation, we
use the imagination to conjure up impossible situations. We create new
worlds for ourselves, new theatres for our exploits of pride and
wickedness, and in them, through will and imagination, we enact the sin
that it would be impossible to commit in our actual external lives.

This strong activity of the imagination can and must be directed. If
this mysterious faculty be so prone to produce its own creations, if we
indeed will dream of things that do not belong to the present moment,
let them be holy things.

Yes, let the imagination run as fast as it will, check it in nothing
save in the subjects of its activity. Let it transport us to heavenly
places. Let it picture to our astonished vision the things that will
be hereafter, the company of heaven, {96} the companionship of the
Saints, the glory of the Lamb.

Or, if these ranges be too lofty, let the fancy create new earthly
theatres for our activity. Let us picture ourselves following Jesus as
He "went about doing good";[4] let us see Him healing the lepers,
opening the eyes of the blind, raising the dead, blessing the little
children; let us bring vividly before us the great example of His life;
and let the picture so burn itself, through the power of the
imagination, into the very fabric of the brain, that we cannot choose
but make it the model for our own lives.

So, after a time, the imagination will become so trained that it will
ever be creating holy things, and presenting them for our
consideration, and will become incapable, in the end, of producing any
picture that could not find ready reflection in the stainless mirror of
the human mind of our Blessed Lord.

When we consider the method of thus training the inner man, we find
that our course must be shaped by means of certain practices, which
should be strenuously pursued if real progress is to be made. These
practices will be, as a Kempis says particularly of one of them, as a
rudder guiding the shi