64. Testing Ourselves
Testing Ourselves NOT REPAIRING.—Conversion is no repairing of the old building; but it takes all down, and erects a new structure. It is not putting on a patch. The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric,—from the foundation to the top stone, all new. He is a new man, a new creature. All things are become new. Conversion is a deep work, a heart-work; it turns all upside down, and makes a man be in a new world.
CHANGE SOMEWHERE.—A Scotch girl was converted under the preaching of Whitefield. She was asked if her heart was changed, and gave the beautiful reply, “Something I know is changed; it may be the world, it may be my heart. There is a change somewhere; for everything is different from what it once was.” A ROMAN’S CUSTOM.—Seneca tells of a Roman that kept his soul as clean as the best housewife keeps her house, every night examining his own soul: “What infirmity hast thou healed? What fault hast thou done, and not repented? In what degree art thou bettered?” Then he would lie down, exclaiming, “With how welcome sleep, and how quiet rest do I entertain the night!”
MEDITATIVE ENGINEER.—Whoever has pondered long over a plan which he is anxious to accomplish, without distinctly seeing at first the way, knows what meditation is. It was in this way that one of the greatest of English engineers is said to have accomplished his most marvelous triumphs. He threw bridges over almost impracticable torrents. Sometimes a difficulty brought all the work to a pause, then he would shut himself up in his room, speak to no one, abandon himself intensely to the contemplation of that on which his heart was set, and at the end of two or three days would come forth serene, walk to the spot and give orders which seemed the result of superhuman intuition.
REPENT IN YOUTH.—If a man sets about climbing a steep cliff when he is young and active, and has the free use of his limbs, he has a great advantage; the old and the crippled are pretty sure to fail. So it is with repentance. The young can mount the hill, if they set about it in good earnest, with much less effort. But they who are old in sin, they whose souls have become stiff through years of wickedness, and have grown double, so to say, by looking earthward,—how much more difficult it is for them!
HEART A RESERVOIR.—The heart is the reservoir of man. Life may flow through different outlets,—the mouth, the hand, the eye; but still all derive their source from the central reservoir, the heart; and hence the great necessity that exists for keeping this reservoir—the heart—in a proper state and condition. A BASKET OF THOUGHTS.—Suppose a man should find a great basket by the wayside, carefully packed, and on opening it, he should find it filled with human thoughts, all the thoughts which had passed through one single brain in one year or five years,—what a medley they would make! How many would be wild and foolish, how many weak and contemptible, how many mean and vile, how many so contradictory and crooked, that they could hardly lie still in the basket. And suppose he should be told that these were all his own thoughts, children of his own brain, how amazed would he be! How little prepared to see himself as revealed in those thoughts! And how would he want to run away and hide, if all the world were to see the basket opened and see his thoughts!