Page:MeditationsOnTheMysteriesOfOurHolyV1.djvu/304

 it that thou hast dared thus to denounce war against Almighty God!

I will next consider the great injury that comes to me by these senses, ill-guarded and unmortified.

1. For, first, they are the gates and windows by which, as the prophet Jeremias says, the death of sin "is entered into" the house of my soul, destroys the life of grace, and suffocates the vital heat of charity; for by them enter the temptations of the devils, who, like thieves, rob the house of my conscience; spoiling it of the gifts of Almighty God and of all virtue. Whereupon says the same prophet, "My eye hath wasted my soul for, as the eye robbed Eve of her original justice, Dinah of her virginity, and David of his chastity and justice, so it robs me sometimes of my temperance, sometimes of my devotion, and the like does the ear and tongue. For as a city " that lieth open, and is not compassed with walls,"  when besieged by enemies, is entered, sacked and destroyed, so is the soul that has no guard over its senses.

2. These also give entrance to the images and figures of visible things which disquiet the imagination and memory with distractions and wanderings, these pervert the appetites with disorder of passions, and disturb the heart, casting us out of it. And for this cause likewise it is true that my eye wastes my soul, because it wastes my attention, my thought and affection, causing my soul not to be so much within me as out of me, in the thing that it meditates and loves. And I myself likewise, by these gates, issue out of myself to wander through the whole world, and after me issues out the spirit of devotion, prayer and contemplation. So that when I would return to enter into myself I hit not