Impurity

“ A mind retaining all the dew and freshness of innocence shrinks from the very idea of impurity, the very suggestion of it, as if it were sin to have even thought or heard of it, as if even the shadow of the evil would leave some soil on the unsullied whiteness of the virgin mind. "When modesty is once extinguished, it knows not a return." ”

“ Without purity how should we recognise impurity? It is light which makes us understand what darkness is. Many people not discerning in themselves certain particular vices think that they possess the opposite virtues, and are deceived.
Again, seeing themselves freed from some earthly passions they imagine themselves to be clothed in heavenly affections; and thus their ill-advised heart is darkened, they feed upon wind, and walk on in the vanity of their thoughts. ”

“ You ought not to rest satisfied that today you have not frequently entertained an impure thought. For, there is ever a species of impurity that does not catch our attention ; because it is so nice, so subtle, so insidious that we are not able to detect it easily. ”

“ Are you pure, in order that you may wrap your garments round you and say to the impure: Stand aside. I will not be polluted. O my friends, the purity that can be polluted is not purity at all, but a garment cast over impurity, hiding it from the world. ”

“ That carping censoriousness which scents out impurity in every bold sally, is, at best, but an ambiguous criterion of purity of morals; and beneath this hypocritical guise there often lurks the consciousness of an impure imagination. ”

“ Why, man, the purity which knows not impurity is emasculate compared with the purity which knows impurity, which has fought with impurity, and yet, in the end, after conflicts innumerable, vanquishes impurity! ”

“ Gravity of the Sin of Impurity.— (a) Impurity is a mortal sin, because it is a disorder that affects a good of the highest importance (viz, the propagation of the race) , and brings in its train public and private, moral and physical, evils of the most serious kind. Man has no more right to degrade his body by lust than he has to kill it by suicide, for God is the absolute Lord over the body and He severely forbids impurity of every kind. ”

“ Reasoning according to your own logic: while before you willingly witnessed, heard and uttered things shameful and unchaste, and sought lewdness, lending your bodies to it, let impurity now be distressing to your sight and hearing; let the body flee from it; be pure in words and works. ”

“ Impurity is a mere superimposition under which your real nature has become hidden. But the real you is already perfect, already strong. ”

“ And this reflection brings us to the first question of importance, what this primitive concept of purity and impurity really is, and what were the sensations from which it was evolved. Nothing is more difficult to describe than simple sensations, but it is possible to distinguish one from another. And we must distinguish between the modern feeling about cleanliness and the primitive feelings which we are considering. ”

“ Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. ”

“ Wherefore, to him that is pure, all things, whether high or low, are an occasion of greater good and further purity; even as the man that is impure is apt to derive evil from things both high and low, because of his impurity. ”

“ We might thus create a real feeling of indecency, the perception of a new impurity, which would take the place of the former absence of all impure thought, and once established, the evil would be as real as our whims have made it in other respects. ”

“ Why are not the bodies of the wicked, it may be asked, as much denied and deformed with natural impurity and disease as their minds with moral and spiritual impurity? The answer is in the teaching above quoted concerning the general influx from heaven into the corresponding externals of the body providing that the corporeals of man shall not be controlled by the particular spirits attendant on him. ”

“ To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity. ”

“ In view of these facts—as unpleasant to mention as they are essential to a faithful description of the habits of the people—it is clear that the "horror of physical impurity" has not been, and is not now, so great as some would have us believe. Whatever may have been the condition in ancient times, it would be difficult to believe that the rite of ceremonial purification could arise out of the present practices and habits of thought. ”

“ Thus the more earth predominates in the composition, the less pure is the individual; and we see that men and women with their full-grown bodies have not the purity of childhood. So in proportion to the time which the union of body and soul has lasted, is the impurity contracted by the spiritual part. ”

“ But no perfection is so absolute,
That some impurity doth not pollute. ”

“ In this way habits of impurity originate.
He who wishes to prevent sins of impurity from entering his heart must surround it with a thorny hedge of mortification; I mean that he must by severe self-discipline bring his body Into subjection to the spirit.
In order to overcome their bodies, the saints ate sparingly, slept but little, wore rough penitential garments, dwelt in caves, sometimes even beneath the vault of heaven, and practised various corporal austerities. In order to vanquish his rebellious flesh, St. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ An evil or impure thought draws round the thinker evil and impure influences, attracts to him all the gross and loathsome creatures who come near him. These will, in turn, react upon his mind and his astral body, and disturb his rest by awakening all kinds of low and earthly desires. ”

“ The sad side of impecuniosity is, unfortunately, so vast a subject that it would require an entire volume, instead of part of a chapter, to properly record the miseries of mind and body endured by those in past ages, who, not unknown to fame, have been permitted to pine and die in despair. ”

“ Shall I say—to show the extent of the evil—that they are sometimes heard from both parents? Now no serious observer of human life and conduct can doubt that by every species of impure language, whether in the form of hints, innuendoes, double entendres, or plainer speech, impure thoughts are awakened, a licentious imagination inflamed, and licentious purposes formed, which would otherwise never have existed. ”

“ THUS far we have dealt with that class of the general expulsion of evils which I have called direct or immediate. In this class the evils are invisible, at least to common eyes, and the mode of deliverance consists for the most part in beating the empty air and raising such a hubbub as may scare the mischievous spirits and put them to flight. It remains to illustrate the second class of expulsions, in which the evil influences are embodied in a visible form or are at least supposed to be loaded upon a material medium, which acts as a vehicle to draw them off from the people, village, or town. ”

“ Varying amounts, degrees, and kinds of good, but good and only good, everywhere, would render all, even transitory, pollution of the soul, and all, even passing, purification of it, so much actual impossibility and theoretical superstition. ”

“ What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than from impure to be becoming pure? It is almost desirable to be impure that we may be the subject of this improvement. That I am innocent to myself! ”

“ Now why should we force ourselves to corrupt the state of nature which has separated the universe into things major and minor, superior and inferior, illustrious [Pg 54] and obscure, worthy and unworthy, not only outside ourselves but also inside in the substance of us, even to that part of us which is said to be immaterial? ”

“ Shewing that all the mutability of our tempers, the disorders of our passions, the corruption of our hearts, all the reveries of the imagination, all the contradictions and absurdities that are to be found in human life, and human opinions, are in effect the mutability, disorders, corruption, and absurdities of human reason. ”

“ If, therefore, certain evils and destructions happen to parts, they are salutary and good as with reference to wholes and the harmony of the universe, but to parts they introduce a necessary corruption, either from not being able to bear the energies of wholes, or from a certain other commixture and temperament of their own imbecility, or, in the third place, from the privation of symmetry in the parts to each other. ”

“ But this consideration forces us still further, and we feel compelled to ask ourselves, whether, with our minds constituted as they are, we can believe in, or understand any thing wholly immaterial? Whether we can imagine the existence, for, example, of "force" without matter?—a shape which is formless?—a form visible to the eye, yet wholly immaterial? ”

“ The laws too of matter seem more wonderful the more I study them, in the whirling eddies of the dust, in the curious shells of former life buried by thousands in a grain of chalk, or in the shining diagrams of light above my head. Even the ugly becomes beautiful [Pg 137] when truly seen. ”

“ His two hags, Impatience and Impotence, as attendant upon the evil spirit of Passion, embrace all the phenomena of human conduct, down even to the smallest matters, according to the adage, "More haste, worse speed." ”

“ The first were such as had relation to those inferior Bodies, which, are plac'd in this World of Generation and Corruption, as Heat, which they impart to those of their own Nature, and Cold by accident, Illumination, Rarefaction, and Condensation, and all those other things, by which they influence these inferior Bodies, whereby they are dispos'd for the Reception of Spiritual Forms from the necessarily self-existent Agent. ”

“ How expressive all these are of the nature of sin and the state of a sinner, a spiritual mind will at once perceive.
1. The original infection or corruption of nature is the grand hidden cause, source, and spring of all transgression.
2. Iniquity is a seed that has its growth, gradual increase, and perfection. As the various powers of the mind are developed, so it diffuses itself, infecting every passion and appetite through their whole extent and operation. ”

“ I rank the spiritualistic philosophy with other philosophies. Perhaps some of its dicta proceed from spirits, if spirits exist, but the system as a whole most surely does not. But then, it will be said, the people who have elaborated this philosophy must have been impostors. No, not inevitably; I will even venture to say that imposture is unlikely. The key to the mystery may be found in other characteristics of humanity. ”

“ Such is the nature even of our most baneful impressions that instances do arise where good may come from so corrupt a source. The connection between material and immaterial, between mind and matter, so operates, that sometimes, and in proportion to the strength of the impression, a change is wrought by the mere control of the mind over the bodily functions. ”

“ But to return to Immaterial Spirits, that they should rule and govern infinite corporeal matter, like so many demy-Gods, by a dilating nod, and a contracting frown, and cause so many kinds and sorts of Corporeal Figures to arise, being Incorporeal themselves, is Impossible for me to conceive; for how can an Immaterial substance cause a Material corporeal substance, which has no motion in it self, to form so many several and various figures and creatures, and make so many alterations, and continue their kinds and sorts by perpetual successions of Particulars? ”

“ If the word immateriality be understood, as it very well may, in the sense of universality, we may assert, with perfect truth and propriety, and as a known and proved fact, the immateriality of the mind, ego, or thinking principle. ”

“ Impudence, too, has its grades and degrees—its ancient types and its more modern ones—but as they all veil their brassy splendors, merging their separate rays in the central effulgence of our spiritual Colossus, we shall waive their particular enumeration in favor of the individualised impersonation of them all. ”

“ That immutability, which constitutes the perfection of what we (from the poverty of language) term the divine mind, would inevitably be the bane of creatures liable to error; it is of the constancy, rather than of the fickleness, of human beings, that we have reason to complain. ”

“ If we permit our imagination to traverse the obscure regions of possibility, we may doubtless imagine, according to the complexion of our minds, that disorder may have a relative tendency to unmingled good, or order be relatively replete with exquisite and subtile evil. ”

“ Is it not sufficient unto Thee that each object grows by itself and not in a chain of antecedents and consequences ? Even as bubbles rise by themselves on the surface of the deep, may we not spring into existence on the surface of Thy illimitable life? ”

“ But that little is quite sufficient to dispose of the theory of pure imposture. On the other hand, there is nothing spiritual and nothing very human in the pranks played by or in the presence of the mediums. ”

“ It is frequently averred nowadays that much that is written bears evidence of being of a non-practical character, and under these circumstances, I felt I should take a pardonable pride in being able to point to one volume in the English language to which this stigma could not be applied; for I flatter myself the subject of Impecuniosity is one with which I have long—too long—been practically familiar. ”