Unclean spirit

“ When once their sensuality and their forsaking of God, hath provoked God to forsake them, and give them up to the rage of that sensuality, an unclean spirit sometimes takes possession of them, and wholly inclineth them to wallow in uncleanness: they can scarce look a comely person in the face, that is of the other sex, but unclean thoughts are rising in their hearts; they think of filthiness when they are alone; they dream of filthiness in the night ”

“ When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. ”

“ To this conception the word unclean was designed to give expression, the intense meaning of which is liable to escape the casual reader of the Scriptures. It signified, not the mere external soiling of the living person, but death, corruption, and rottenness within the heart, the fermenting source of pollution poured forth in the outward life. To impress us with a just sense of the exceeding evil of this thing the Spirit employs every variety of figure expressive of deformity and loathsomeness. ”

“ It is a fact, the significance of which none of us fully realize, as yet, that a clean mind and a clean heart in an unclean body is very rare. A quick, alert balanced mind and a pure, heroic spirit in a starved and diseased body is also rare. ”

“ Faith purifies the heart, but if ye examine yourselves, your hearts will be found unclean, and such as the Holy Ghost cannot dwell in. The temple in which God's Holy Spirit resides must touch no unclean thing, 2 Cor. vi. 16, 17. Are not many men's corruptions rank and lively? Unclean hands are an infallible demonstration of an unclean heart, James iv. 8. These things which proceed out of the heart may teach you what is within the heart. The streams may let you know what is in the fountain Mark vii. ”

“ The note of purity is far higher than in Stoic or Platonist. Uncleanness is spurned with the horror which pure love and holiness inspire.
"Fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints. Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not becoming, but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger nor unclean person nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. ”

“ God hath not called us unto uncleanness but unto holiness. Let us, therefore cleanse ourselves from all filthiness—from all manner of pollution—of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. ”

“ And therefore to force the body of your soul into contact with uncleanness is a great violation of your soul. The soul wishes to keep clean and whole. The soul's deepest will is to preserve its own integrity, against the mind and the whole mass of disintegrating forces.
Soul sympathises with soul. And that which tries to kill my soul, my soul hates. My soul and my body are one. Soul and body wish to keep clean and whole. Only the mind is capable of great perversion. Only the mind tries to drive my soul and body into uncleanness and unwholesomeness.
What my soul loves, I love. ”

“ That the people of God by being obliged to abstain from things corporally unclean, might be trained up to seek a spiritual cleanness.—Hoof divided and cheweth the cud, signifies discretion between good and evil and meditating on the laws of God: and where either of these is wanting, a man is unclean in like manner. ”

“ This is done by the manifestation of the atonement, the application of truth, and the power of the p. 24Gospel, by the sacred indwelling and the powerful operations of the ever-blessed Spirit. But the furnace of affliction generally attends this work—many long to see me out of it; and my nature often rebels against it, but faith knows, it is good to be here. The filthiness from which we must be cleansed is all the uncleanness; pollution, and impurity of our defiled nature, in their guilt, love, power, and practice—from these will I cleanse them. ”

“ Can we have a pure soul and an unclean body? Can we have an honest heart and a pilfering hand? Certainly not. For as the pure soul cleanses the body, so the degraded body pollutes the soul. Soul and body must grow together,—and alike. ”

“ In exploring this wilderness of inhumanity, filled with the shapes and motley sights of degradation, I live in a perpetual struggle how to calm the natural expressions of an honest soul into that measured phrase that may best suit the sated public ear. If one overhang this abyss until his spirit do drink in its very import, his soul must be full of thunder and his words glance like fire. ”

“ Our character is refined to pure gold. The gross lusts of the flesh, the commonness which is in all of us, the pettiness of spirit, disappear in these profitable afflictions. From a bed of sickness may spring the most delicate flowers of unselfishness, of devotion, and of true saintliness. ”

“ We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and all the soap and nitre in the world cannot make us pure and holy. "If I wash myself with snow-water, and make my hands never so clean, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me." ”

“ How often are the perceptions of truth darkened in the mind, and the man walks about, even at noon-day, as in a mental night, his spirit wrapped as in a shroud, and bound hand and foot! God and heaven seem to be blotted out, and the whole universe appears a blank. And then, in the darkness, lurid fires of lusts are kindled in the heart, and the man is invited to seek relief in sensuality and sin, and sometimes even in self-murder. ”

“ But far more important than that thought is the human condition that is required ere this cleansing can be realised. 'I am a man of unclean lips.' 'I am undone!' It was because that conviction and confession sprang in the prophet's consciousness that the seraph winged his way with the purifying fire in his hands. Which being translated is just this: faith alone will not bring cleansing. There must go with it what we call, in our Christian phraseology, repentance, which is but the recognition of my own antagonism to the holiness of God, and the resolve to turn my back on my own past self. ”

“ Inasmuch as God here purges the soul according to the substance of its sense and spirit, and according to the interior and exterior faculties, the soul must needs be in all its parts reduced to a state of emptiness, poverty and abandonment and must be left dry and empty and in darkness. For the sensual part is purified in aridity, the faculties are purified in the emptiness of their perceptions and the spirit is purified in thick darkness. ”

“ For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly; and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.” If I were to talk an hour, I could not give a clearer definition of what is meant by uncleanness. It is obviously a work of the flesh, and all who are guilty stand condemned in the sight of God Almighty. ”

“ Their aversion to the flesh of the ‘unclean beast’ is, on the contrary, of that peculiar character, resembling an instinctive antipathy, which the idea of uncleanness, when once it thoroughly sinks into the feelings, seems always to excite even in those whose personal habits are anything but scrupulously cleanly, and of which the sentiment of religious impurity, so intense in the Hindoos, is a remarkable example. ”

“ Purity.—The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first, increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced, and the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes imperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless severity. ”

“ And, as we have seen, it destroys (which is more important than destruction of mere life) our sensibility to those diffuse, long-drawn, gentle, restorative pleasures which are not merely durable, but, because they invigorate our spirit, are actually reproductive of themselves, multiplying, like all sane desirable things, like grain and fruit, ten-fold. ”

“ He delights in filth, and filth they serve him in abundance. From every cess-pool and garbage-plot, from every loathsome swamp and poisonous marsh, from every infected spot, a thick cloud laden with nauseous odors and death rises up to his nostrils. Surely the god must be satisfied. What else has he sought during his long career from his boyhood to his old age? To what did he devote his wonderful activity but to create those very sinks of moral degradation which send back to him from their unclean depths the impure homage which they are fit to give? ”

“ But there is a heartache still within the soul; there is an uncleanness there too deep to be touched by anything external,—so deep that it baffles every effort to cleanse it, and appears to rise with fresh power at the very time that they endeavour to apply their remedy. ”

“ What vaults of uncleanness, what sinks of dreadful horrors, would not the souls of some of us grow! But for every one of them, as for the universe, comes the day of cleansing. Happy they who hasten it! who open wide the doors, take the broom in the hand, and begin to sweep! The dust may rise in clouds; the offense may be great; the sweeper may pant and choke, and weep, yea, grow faint and sick with self-disgust ”

“ We contaminate the health stream with our thought poisons. Our doubts, our fears, our unbeliefs, our brutal passions, our selfishness, our greed, our hatreds, our jealousies, our revenge, our ingratitude for life, for the blessings we enjoy,—all of these things tend to pollute the stream which we receive pure as it flows from the crystal fountain, the divine source of the All Good. ”

“ Yes, separated for ever from this external world, your thoughts must needs revert to yourself, and your vision dwell internally upon the bygone scenes of your ill-spent life; and I am not without hope that such a mental and constantly presented picture will send the blush of shame even upon your hardened features, that your soul, deadened as it now is to every good and holy impulse, will become softened and tender by repentance. ”

“ That is why I interfere, for your own good as we are enjoined. Uncleanliness must lead to the body’s hurt, in so far as it can be hurt. But mind and matter being one, what hurts the one will hurt the other. ”

“ For it feels within itself a profound emptiness and impoverishment of three kinds of good, which are ordained for the pleasure of the soul which are the temporal, the natural and the spiritual; and finds itself set in the midst of the evils contrary to these, namely, miseries of imperfection, aridity and emptiness of the apprehensions of the faculties and abandonment of the spirit in darkness. ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged 345 nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? No wonder that the poor soul longs for the hour of release from such a companion.
But that human body which God declares expressly was made to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, which he considers worthy to be perpetuated by a resurrection and an immortal existence, cannot be intended to be a clog and a hindrance to spiritual advancement. ”

“ They are generated by greed, envy, jealousy, covetousness, backbiting, amorous longings and other impure thoughts. With the soul filled with this conglomeration of virus and filth, why doubt a hell and its counterpart condition, or expect the day or night to bring happiness? If evil thoughts will infest the soul with ravenous microbes, good thoughts and deeds will starve and suppress their activity, and create a heaven to supplant them. ”

“ Thou canst trim thy body, and spend many a minute at the glass; dost thou not care for thy soul? How long thou takest to decorate thy poor flesh, which is but worm's meat, or would be in a minute if God took away thy breath! And yet all the while thy soul is uncombed, unwashed, unclad, a poor neglected thing. Oh it should not be so. You take care of the worse part and leave the better to perish through neglect. ”

“ We ourselves, in regard to our own hearts, which are made to be the temples of the 'living God,' are ever, by our sins, shortcomings, and selfishness, bringing pollution into the holiest of all; 'breaking down the carved work thereof with axes and hammers,' and setting up the abomination of desolation in the holy places of our hearts. We pollute them all—conscience, imagination, memory, will, intellect. ”

“ If the self is not impoverished, unkempt, and hungry, in fact, it is made so. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but self-defilement is godliness; sainthood, if we are to trust the lives of saints, whether in Asia or in Europe, is coincident with insanitation; saintly virtues are depressed virtues,—humility, hope, meekness, pity; and such conditions of life which define the holy ones are unwholesome—poverty, asceticism, squalor, filth. Hence, by an ironic inversion, religions of disillusion, being other-worldly, identify escape from an actual unpropitious environment with submergence in it ”