modesty.  Prudery detects wrong where no wrong is; the wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in the objects.  There is something of over-sensitiveness and over-delicacy which shows not innocence, but an inflammable imagination.  And men of the world cannot understand that those subjects and thoughts which to them are full of torture, can be harmless, suggesting nothing evil to the pure in heart.

Here however, beware!  No sentence of Scripture is more frequently in the lips of persons who permit themselves much license, than the text, “To the pure, all things are pure.”  Yes, all things natural, but not artificial—­scenes which pamper the tastes, which excite the senses.  Innocence feels healthily.  To it all nature is pure.  But, just as the dove trembles at the approach of the hawk, and the young calf shudders at the lion never seen before, so innocence shrinks instinctively from what is wrong by the same divine instinct.  If that which is wrong seems pure, then the heart is not pure but vitiated.  To the right minded all that is right in the course of this world seems pure.  Abraham, looking forward to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, entreated that it might be averted, and afterwards acquiesced!  To the disordered mind “all things are out of course.”  This is the spirit which pervades the whole of the Ecclesiastes.  There were two things which were perpetually suggesting themselves to the mind of Solomon; the intolerable sameness of this world, and the constant desire for change.  And yet that same world, spread before the serene eye of God, was pronounced to be all “very good.”

This disordered universe is the picture of your own mind.  We make a wilderness by encouraging artificial wants, by creating sensitive and selfish feelings; then we project everything stamped with the impress of our own feelings, and we gather the whole of creation into our own pained being—­“the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”  The world you complain of as impure and wrong is not God’s world, but your world; the blight, the dullness, the blank, are all your own.  The light which is in you has become darkness, and therefore the light itself is dark.

 Again, to the pure, all things not only seem pure, but are really so
 because they are made such.

1.  As regards persons.  It is a marvellous thing to see how a pure and innocent heart purifies all that it approaches.  The most ferocious natures are soothed and tamed by innocence.  And so with human beings, there is a delicacy so pure, that vicious men in its presence become almost pure; all of purity which is in them is brought out; like attaches itself to like.  The pure heart becomes a centre of attraction, round which similar atoms gather, and from which dissimilar ones are repelled.  A corrupt heart elicits in an hour all that is bad in us; a spiritual one brings out and draws to itself all that is best and purest.