Ungodliness

“ For there is nothing in the world—the world
Of things existent, things substantial, real,
Spirit or matter—that as counterpart
Answers to these conceived resemblances,
These idols framed by your artificers,
Pretending to be images of gods;
Nothing, I mean, that can be called Divine.
Behind them there is something real indeed,
But evil, not good; no such reality
As that ye dream. Demons, not gods are they,
[494] Who, hid behind your idols, mask and mock.
Therefore we can but hate idolatry,
And flee it as one flees a pestilence. ”

“ For what were our poor world the better of this holy God if He be content to sit aloof in the light and glory of heaven, leaving the web of human story to be woven by the blundering fingers of sinning, erring men on earth? ”

“ I know not justly, if it be a weakness or a sin to create these phantoms that we love, and to group them into a paradise—soul-created. But if it is a sin, it is a sweet and enchanting sin; and if it is a weakness, it is a strong and stirring weakness. ”

“ This is designed to arrest our attention, and call forth our love, wonder, admiration, and praise—to lead us to the contemplation of his Agony and bloody Sweat—when in a cold night, such was the agitation of his Soul, beneath the Wrath of God, the Guilt of our Sin, and his Struggles with the Powers of Hell, that he exclaimed My Soul (being truly human) is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. ”

“ I make no apology for this abrupt address, but assure you, that if you die in these awful sentiments of denying the Godhead, divinity and distinct personality of the Holy Spirit, your end will be awful indeed; to treat his sacred person with such awful contempt is shocking, and to teach others so to do adds to your crime.
That there is a Holy Spirit you pretend not to deny—but “What is it?” say you and your deluded followers; “O nothing but a mere breath, a point, a mere emanation, that’s all!” ”

“ Having seen exhibitions of power, he can say, omnipotent. Having lived, he can say, immortality. Knowing something of time, he can say, eternity. Conceiving something of intelligence, he can say, God Having seen exhibitions of malice, he can say, devil. A few gleams of happiness having fallen athwart the gloom of his life, he can say, heaven. Pain, in its numberless forms, having been experienced, he can say, hell. Yet all these ideas have a foundation in fact, and only a foundation. ”

“ The angels of heaven are cast down from the height of their excellency, and divested of all their glory and dignity, upon their disobedience. Whoever sins against God does a manifest hurt to himself. 4. Those who rebel against the God of heaven shall all be sent down to hell. There is no place nor state between the height of glory and the depth of misery in which they shall be allowed to rest. If creatures sin in heaven, they must suffer in hell. 5. Sin is the work of darkness, and darkness is the wages of sin. The darkness of misery and torment follows the darkness of sin. ”

“ This is the blessing and the curse. It seems as if the latter were of God, and the natural mind so views it. It really is of man; and the spiritual mind reads of God's curse, as the poet reads of the angry sun. Each one reads according to his nature. But he who follows the Word of God in its spirit, thinks of the curse of the Lord as the angels think of it—as the divine mercy resting with man amid the very ruins of his nature, and rendering him as happy as possible in the dreary region of life he has sought and found. ”

“ The nearer we get to that consciousness of Being-one-with-the-Reality, the more we see and can meditate upon the wonderful "joy" which permeates all creation; but without that consciousness it is invisible, and the world is dark and evil and unloving, and to many, alas! appears more the handiwork of a Devil than of a God of Love. ”

“ In the old creeds they described this God as a being without body and parts or passions. Think of that! Something without body and parts or passions. I defy any man in the world to write a letter descriptive of nothing. You can not conceive of a finer word-painting of a vacuum than a something without body and parts or passions. And yet this God, without passions, is angry at the wicked every day; this God, without passions, is a jealous God, whose anger burneth to the lowest hell. ”

“ But the overflowings of sin within and without, the contempt of sacred institutions, the carelessness of soul, the pride of unbelief, the eagerness of sensual appetite, the ambition for worldly greatness, and the deep-rooted enmity of the carnal heart against God: these things are as “the fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought,” which distress his soul, as he journeys through “that great and terrible wilderness.”
Sometimes, like a solitary pilgrim, he weeps in secret places, and rivers of water run down his eyes, because men keep not the law of God. ”

“ The human heart, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Where true godliness wanes false religions rush in to fill the void; and the intensity of zeal which false religions awaken measures the declension that has befallen true faith. ”

“ Already a great calm was broadening down over the world, because the abomination of desolation, the usurper of divine attributes and honours, the false god and true devil, the grim, huge, hideous, overshadowing, bearded idol of a thousand centuries or more, tottered to its fall ”

“ This devil of "Unholy Pleasure" is in full dress and a gentleman of the world. A "regular fellow," so the people of the world declare, but he is a deceiver and destroyer. Seek pure pleasure. Play, but play straight, or the lamps of sin over the pleasure garden of the world will blind your eyes, so you cannot see the evil of sinful pleasures.
This devil will be at the end of the road to make captive your soul forever. Place this card in the heart and say: "Unholy Pleasure is the seventh devil, and now there is a full house of devils. ”

“ Superstition bowed down to worship his idol, and cut his flesh with stones to atone for his soul’s sin. Unbelief scorned to be confined, like an inferior creature, to the earth, and was ever leaping up in the hope of standing on the stars. Exhausted by his efforts he fell, and the fall bruised him, so that he lay as low as the neighbour whom he despised. He who stands between them neither bowed himself to the ground, nor attempted to scale the heavens. He neither degraded himself beneath a man’s place, nor attempted to raise himself above it. ”

“ For, led by him, they would fain be so holy as to enter into the depths of the eternal Godhead, and to sound the secret abyss of the eternal sacred Manhood of the Lord. If thus they became blinded with pride, they bring themselves under the eternal curse. They would attain to a holiness which is reached by mocking at the written Word of God, which speaks to us of the Manhood of our Lord. ”

“ These People tell us nothing of the eternal Reproaches of Conscience, the Horror of Desperation, and the Anguish of a Mind hopeless of ever seeing the Glory, which alone constitutes Heaven, and which makes all other Places dreadful, and even Darkness it self. ”

“ And darkness broods upon him. The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay to hide from deity the living face of man, So god no longer sees his maker. ”

“ Now, you cannot see the Spirit of God work in this audience; but I hope and pray He may be working now in the hearts of many, convincing them of sin! Do you believe more than ever that you are a sinner? Well, that is the work of the Holy Ghost. The devil never told you you are a sinner; he tries to make you believe that you are good enough. If you believe to-night that you have sinned against God, that is the work of the Holy Ghost. ”

“ If you are endowed chiefly with the qualities of devils, which consist in evil machinations, deceit and delusion, then you should know and be aware of it, that you may turn towards the path of perfection. And if you possess angelic qualities, whose nature it is to worship God in sincerity and continually to await the vision of His beauty, then like them you should unceasingly, resting neither day or night, be zealous and strive that you may become worthy of the vision of the Lord. ”

“ The deadliest sin, I say, were the same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact,—is dead; it is ‘pure,’ as dead dry sand is pure. ”

“ That kind of adorning cannot spring from godliness, from either the love or fear of God, from a desire of conforming to his will, or from the mind which was in Christ Jesus. 2. It no way tends to increase godliness; it is not conducive to any holy temper. But 3. It manifestly tends to destroy several of the tempers most essential to godliness. It has no friendly influence on humility; whether we aim at pleasing others or ourselves hereby. Either in one case or the other, it will rather increase pride or vanity than lowliness of heart. ”

“ By sad experience, even a child knows how superstition destroys and piety saves. Let any of you look at those who minister before the idols, their hair matted, their persons disgraced with filthy and tattered clothes; who never come near a bath, and let their nails grow to an extraordinary length, like wild beasts; many of them castrated, who show the idol's temples to be in reality graves or prisons. These appear to me to bewail the gods, not to worship them, and their sufferings to be worthy of pity rather than piety. ”

“ And it’s most perilously easy to fall into it. Stifling the voices inside you, filling the mind with so much earthy rubbish that God has no room to enter it, not giving the spirit its fair chance—that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. ”

“ The monstrous blasphemy of creeds
Which represent an angry God,
Who tempts man sorely through his needs,
And meets his failings with a rod—
Eternal wrath, through blood appeased,
The curse of God, salvation’s plan,
Are nightmare visions, which have seized
The slumbering consciousness of man. ”

“ And worst and darkest of all, when in that stupid, sinful, loveless state of mind, God’s loving Spirit still strives and pleads with us, and tries to awaken us, and terrify us with the sight of the everlasting misery and ruin into which we have thrown ourselves, we may turn those pleadings of God’s Spirit, by our own evil wills, into a darker curse than all which have gone before. ”

“ Among the strangers, the power of God was no less wonderfully displayed in awakening them from the deep sleep of sin and death: they came and confessed their sins and their crimes, which, though formerly deemed light matters, now heavily burdened their consciences. "Human nature shudders and starts back," says the missionary diary, "on hearing the horrid detail of the abominations practised among the heathen;" ”

“ Oh there are terrible moments in human experience, moments when even the Christian is so haunted by the demon of unbelief, when the dire enemy of God and man takes advantage of some unpropitious circumstance, some painful affliction, to taunt the soul, already almost crushed, and to inquire, with fiendish malignity, "Where is now thy God?" ”

“ Remember that Thou wast a man. I pray to Thee, not because Thou art God of God, Light of light, very God of very God, but because Thou hast lived poor and humble on this earth where now I suffer, because Satan has tempted Thy flesh, because the sweat of agony has bedewed Thy face. ”

“ Then we seek it in a creature fallible as ourselves; we expend upon it all the high energies given us for far nobler ends. We refuse to worship God, and kneel before a worm like ourselves! But when the veil falls, when we see behind the clouds of incense and the halos woven by love, only a miserable and imperfect creature—we blush for our delusion, overturn our idol in our despair, and trample it rudely under foot. ”

“ What is more terrible than the eternal, irreparable fall and banishment of once lofty angelic nature that resulted when the devil robbed himself of the honor and glory enjoyed by the noble blessed spirits, and of the contemplation of eternal God, and brought upon himself everlasting and intolerable damnation by seeking to make himself equal with God, and through similar pride, led the human race to its awful fall? ”

“ You have all drawn veils over your Divine nature through this illusion, and from this illusion springs all the acts which keep you from realizing your Divine nature. Your greed, your vanity, your self-conceit, your love of praise, your love of self, your attachment to yourself, and all that is yours, your appetites all act as shades over the windows of the soul. ”

“ In this astonishing passage, through Satanism to faith, in which the cry, "I am so weary of myself, so sick of my miserable existence," echoes through page after page, until despair dies into conviction, the conviction of "the uselessness of concerning oneself about anything but mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking about anything but about, God," it is impossible not to see the sincerity of an actual, unique experience. ”

“ Such changes as spring from the occultly creative acts of the spiritual world, or more exactly the spirit-world, represented by God in the character of an extraneous being, by a personal devil or by those minor spirits or powers of light or darkness, often if not usually described as objects of superstition, no longer interfere with nature's orderly course. ”