We have perverted our language because thought, of which language is the clothing, is perverted. We dare not handle questions that in themselves are pure, because we have allowed necessary words to represent unnecessary indelicacy. No word that expresses a necessary fact is in itself evil; but woe to the imagination which makes it so! Purity is always dignified. But if you take the white roses of innocence to crown a wanton, white roses will fall into disrepute; and this is what we have done with language. Words no longer only mean the thing they represent. They have been made to insinuate the foul underflow of evil fancy that corruption has poured forth. How shall we cleanse the source, that we may once more use language of strength and purity? How shall we again become manly and brave, and yet avoid the charge of being coarse and too outspoken? Only by going back to the noble candor of the great thinkers of old, and by trying to see things as they are in the mind of God, and not as they are in fallen man; by looking at the laws of creation as they came from the hands of the Creator, before man had written his running commentary of evil and sin, and thus defiled the glorious page. There are two forms of purity. The one is the purity of ignorance. The intellect that knows nothing of the species cannot predicate the accidents; and no doubt blank ignorance is better than an evil imagination. But there is another and a higher purity; it is the purity of an informed mind which, from the sublime heights of science, or, better far, from the depths of union with God in the all-pervading sense of his presence, has acquired that faculty of viewing subject-matter in the abstract which leaves no association of imagination or fancy to drag it down into the lower nature and so defile it. The more truly scientific a mind becomes, the more will it inhabit those cool, serene heights of passionless intellect. But the first, the truest, the absolutely sure science of theology is the one royal road to the habit of mind which can, as it were, stand outside its lower nature and contemplate facts and truths in their essential nature, divested of human contact or defilement; or, where both must be recognized, can eliminate the law from its abuse, and trace back the former to the bosom of the Creator; for “to the pure all things are pure.” This seems to be the faculty which is more and more dying out amongst us.