Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 3.pdf/354

 of Rightcousness animates it with the fervid heat of heaven, and confers upon it all the blessings which the chapter from whence our motto is taken enumerates; so the light of the Sun of Righteousness cheers the understanding, and gives to it a clear perception of truth. But the absence of love to the Lord exemplifies the absence of the Sun of Righteousness; and as where there is no sun there can be no light, so the absence of spiritual light is blindness or darkness. The evil man is spiritually insane, and, confirming himself in evil, he becomes spiritually blind; he loves darkness rather than light, from the very circumstance of his deeds being evil; and there is no cure for this blindness but going to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Light of the world, and if we go to Him He will open our eyes, give us a perception of the enormity of evil, instruct us in the proper application of truth, and restore us to spiritual light and sanity. But if we neglect the Divine warnings, and continue in evil—our evils of heart and falses of understanding—our madness and blindness will finally terminate in stupor of heart. The heart is the grand machine by which physical existence is continued. The suspension of the heart's pulsations is the ceasing of natural life. Stupor of heart, then, in the spiritual sense of the word, implies total insensibility to spiritual life.

Such is the melancholy result of disobedience to the Divine precepts. They are smitten—not by the Lord, but by their own evils—with madness, blindness, and stupor of heart. Our duty is plain, and, with the Lord's assistance, easy; namely, to keep the commandments. If we "would enter into life. ."