Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Of the Charms of Perfumes Which are More Easily Overcome.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XXXII.—Of the Charms of
Perfumes Which are More Easily Overcome.
48. With the attractions of odours I am not
much troubled. When absent I do not seek them; when present I do
not refuse them; and am prepared ever to be without them. At any
rate thus I appear to myself; perchance I am deceived. For that
also is a lamentable darkness wherein my capacity that is in me is
concealed, so that my mind, making inquiry into herself concerning
her own powers, ventures not readily to credit herself; because
that which is already in it is, for the most part, concealed,
unless experience reveal it. And no man ought to feel secure923
| 923 “For some,” says Thomas Taylor (Works, vol. I.
“Christ’s Temptation,” p. 11), “through vain prefidence of
God’s protection, run in times of contagion into infected houses,
which upon just calling a man may: but for one to run out of his
calling in the way of an ordinary visitation, he shall find that
God’s angels have commission to protect him no longer than he is
in his way (Ps. xci. 11), and that being out of it,
this arrow of the Lord shall sooner hit him than another that is
not half so confident.” We should not, as Fuller quaintly says,
“hollo in the ears of a sleeping temptation;” and when we are
tempted, let us remember that if (Hibbert, Syntagma
Theologicum, p. 342) “a giant knock while the door is shut,
he may with ease be still kept out; but if once open, that he gets
in but a limb of himself, then there is no course left to keep out
the remaining bulk.” See also Augustin on Peter’s case, De
Corrept. et Grat. c. 9. | in this
life, the whole of which is called a temptation,924
that he, who could be made better
from worse, may not also from better be made worse. Our sole hope,
our sole confidence, our sole assured promise, is Thy
mercy.
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
