PURE IN HEART | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 8, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 47.

PURE IN HEART.

ALMOST everyone appreciates the duty of governing the tongue, although few people dwell upon the necessity of controlling the thoughts. Right speaking is a recognized duty, but right thinking is too often classed among the impossibilities of life. “It may be wicked to feel so, but I can’t help my thoughts,” apologetically says some detractor. The excuse is a generally accepted one, but it has not sufficient foundation in fact. Isolated thoughts cannot always be controlled. They flash into the mind like obstinate sprites, and the more one fixes the attention upon them in disapproval, the more impossible does it become to expel them. It is, however, within the limits of human effort to control the tendency of the thoughts. When a malicious or frivolous member of the tribe starts into being, they can best be combated, not by out and out fighting, but by turning instantly to another class of valuable and interesting reflections. The mind may be so thoroughly disciplined that its thoughts shall be drilled battalions of soldiers. They will doubtless be always raw troops, not marching according to strict military rule, and not in all cases sure to obey upon the moment, but they will steadily improve with practice, conforming themselves more and more to the true and the good.

Physiologists have a great deal to say about the force of habit. Dispose the brain toward a certain line of thought, and it will keep it with increasing steadiness, for purely physical reasons. It has its automatic action, as the fingers have theirs, when they so accustom themselves to seeking the keys of the piano that they find them without the aid of the eyes. The discipline of the thoughts contributes to the intellectual as well as moral development. There are in all lives unoccupied intervals of time—when one is riding to and from his place of business, or taking his “constitutional,” for example. He cannot read or study to advantage at such moments, but instead of letting the mind drift whither it will, he can fix it upon the last poem he has read, or upon some truth from an author of value.

But, after all, intellectual development is of small value as compared with that of the moral nature. The study to which everyone should lend the greatest energy is that of uprooting all evil from the heart and mind, denying shelter to whatsoever is not absolutely pure and true.—Anon.