‘Then again, we would have you consider that the mere conclusions of the intellect, the handiwork of imagination, the effervescence of sentiment, yea, sensible delight in certain religious exercises—all these things, though religion’s hand-maidens, are not religion herself. Sometimes they are delusive; always are they dangerous, if they, rather than God, become in any way our dependence. If the heart—the central fount of life’s issues—be not God’s, what avail the admitted propositions, and touching pictures, and wafts of sweetness—the mere furniture, adornment, and incense, of the outer courts of thy nature? Christ in thy soul, and not the truth about Him in thy brain, is thy life’s life; and his agony of love must pierce thee somewhat deeper than the pathos of a tragedy. There are those who live complacently on the facilities and enjoyments they have in certain practices of devotion, when all the while it is rather they themselves, as thus devout, and not their Lord, whom they love. Some such are not yet Christians at all. Others, who are, have yet to learn that those emotions they set such store by, belong, most of them, to the earliest and lowest stages of the Christian life. The lotus-flowers are not the Nile. There are those who violently excite the imagination and the feeling by long gazing on the crucifix—by picturing the torments of martyrs—by performing repeated acts of Contrition,—by trying to wish to appropriate to themselves, for Christ’s sake, all the sufferings of all mankind—by praying for a love above that of all seraphim, and do often, in wrestling after such extraordinary gifts, and harrowing their souls with such sensuous horrors, work out a mere passion of the lower nature, followed by melancholy collapse, and found pitiably wanting in the hour of trial.[128] In these states does it oftenest happen that the phantoms of imagination are mistaken for celestial manifestations; and forms which belong to middle air, for shiny ones from the third heaven. I have been told that astronomers have sometimes seen in the field of their glass, floating globes of light—as it seemed, new planets swimming within their ken; and these were but flying specks of dust, hovering in the air; but magnified and made luminous by the lenses through which they looked, and by the reflection of the light. The eye of the mind may be visited by similar illusions. I counsel all, therefore, that they ask only for grace sufficient against present evil, and covet not great things, but be content with such measures of assurance and sensible delight as God shall think safe for them; and that, above all, they look not at His gifts in themselves, but out of themselves, to Him, the Giver.