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purified by the virtue of atoning blood. It is when "the heart is sprinkled from an evil conscience, as it regards the sins which are past, that we are prepared and disposed

so to "exercise ourselves as to have always a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man." The ineffable and serene repose of spirit which arises from faith in the great propitiation, is conducive to the delicate sensibility which recoils from the contact of defilement, even in the images of thought. Let the language of the verse which has been cited remind us, that if it be our desire to guard against the intrusion of vain and evil thoughts, our hearts must be cleansed from the guilt and pollution

of sin.-"Wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee?"

Secondly, The mind must habitually derive from the word of God its best materials of thought.

"I hate vain thoughts," said the Psalmist, "but thy law do I love." He knew too much of the tendencies of his own mind, and too much of the universal laws of intellectual being, to wish, that the expulsion of vain thoughts should be followed by an uninteresting vacuity of thought. This, were it possible, would be undesirable. It would be a dull and dreary blank in existence. It would be, in the lowest sense, existence;

it would not deserve the name of life. But the desire of the man after God's own heart was, that the place vacated by thoughts. which were vain, might be filled by thoughts of substantial excellence. This is indeed the best and the only preservative from thoughts decidedly evil. Could the mind be rendered simply vacant, soon would the tempter pour in a strong and rapid tide of his own impure suggestions. The absence of thoughts which are good he regards as the state most favorable to the entrance of thoughts which are evil; so that without any perversion of the meaning of Scripture we may apply to such a state of mind, our Saviour's description of the inducements presented to

the evil spirit, to occupy the residence into which he anticipates an unresisting facility of admission :-" When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he wandereth over parched deserts in search of a resting-place.* And not finding any, he saith, I will return to my house whence I came; and being come, he findeth it empty, swept and garnished; (as if it directly invited his entrance, and was even prepared for his occupation:) whereupon he goeth and bringeth with him seven other spirits, more wicked than himself, and having entered, there they dwell." "The heart," says an eloquent preacher, "will not consent to be desolated.-Though the room Dr. Campbell's Translation.

which is in it may change one inmate for another, it cannot be left void without the pain of most intolerable suffering. It could not bear to be left in a state of waste and cheerless insipidity. It would revolt against its own emptiness.-Such is the grasping tendency of thẻ human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system. It may be dispossessed of one object, but it cannot be desolated of all.-A man will no more consent to the misery of being without an object, because that object is a trifle, or of

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