Chapter 11: Bound to Know Your True Character they rejected him, and finally put him to death, with as much cold-hearted cruelty as ever their fathers had killed a prophet. "Fill ye up," says our Savior, "the treasure of your fathers, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth."
Mankind have always, in every age of the world, fallen in love with the fictions of their own imagination, over which they have stumbled into hell. Look at the Universalist. He imagines a God that will save everybody, at any rate, and a heaven that will accommodate everybody; and then he loves the God he has made, and the heaven he has imagined, and perhaps will even weep with love. His feelings are often deep, but they are delusive, because excited by fiction and not by truth.
3. The more an individual goes out from himself, and makes things not belonging to himself the subject of thought, the more piety he will have, and the more evidence of his piety.
Religion consists in love, in feeling right and doing right, or doing good. If therefore you wish to have great piety, do not think of having it by cultivating it in a way which never caused piety to grow; that is, by retiring into a cloister, and withdrawing from contact with mankind. If the Lord Jesus Christ had supposed such circumstances to be favorable to piety, he would have directed them so. But he knew better.
He has therefore appointed circumstances as they are, so that his people may have a thousand objects of benevolence, a thousand opportunities to do good. And if they go out of themselves, and turn their hearts upon these things, they cannot fail to grow in piety, and to have their evidences increasing and satisfactory.
4. It is only in one department of self-examination that we can consistently shut ourselves up in the closet to perform the duty; that is, when we want to look back and calmly examine the motives of our past conduct. In such cases it is often necessary to abstract our thoughts and keep out other things from our minds, to turn our minds back and look at things we have done, and the motives by which we were actuated. To do this effectually, it is often necessary to resort to retirement, and fasting, and prayer. Some times it is impossible to wake up a lively recollection of what we wish to examine, without calling in the laws of association to our aid.
We attempt to call up past scenes, and all seems confusion and darkness, until we strike upon some associated idea, that gradually brings the whole fresh before us. Suppose I am to be called as a witness in court concerning a transaction, I can sometimes gain a lively recollection of what took place, only by going to the place, and then all the circumstances come up, as if but of yesterday. So we may find in regard to the reexamination of some part of our past history, that no shutting ourselves up will bring it back, no protracted meditation or fasting, or prayer, till we throw ourselves into some circumstances that will wake up the associated ideas, and thus bring back the feelings we formerly had.
Suppose a minister wishes to look back and see how he felt, and the spirit with which he had preached years ago. He wishes to know how much real piety there was in his labors.
He might get at a great deal in his closet on his knees, by the aid of the strong influences of