Daily Devotionals

Devotional: February 6th

IMPERISHABLE HIEROGLYPHICS

The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars. - Jeremiah 17:1

You and I, by our memory, by that marvellous faculty that people call the imagination, by our desires, are for ever painting the walls of the inmost chambers of our hearts with such pictures. It is an awful faculty that we possess of, so to speak, surrounding ourselves with the pictures of the things that we love, and have yielded ourselves in devotion and desire unto.

I do not dwell upon that, but I want to drop one very earnest caution and beseeching entreaty. Mind what you paint upon those mystic walls! Foul things, "creeping things and abominable beasts," only too many of you are tracing there. Mind! They are ineffaceable. No repentance will obliterate them. I do not know whether even Heaven can blot them out. What you love, what you desire, what you think about, you are photographing, printing on the walls of your immortal nature. And just as to-day, thousands of years after the artists have been gathered to the dust, we may go into Egyptian temples and see the figures on their walls, in all the freshness of their first coloring, as if the painter had but laid down his pencil a moment ago; so, on your hearts, youthful evils, the sins of your boyhood, the pruriences of your earliest days, may live ugly shapes, that no tears and no repentance will ever wipe out. Nothing can do away with "the marks of that which once hath been." What are you painting on the chambers of imagery in your hearts?- obscenity, foul things, mean things, low things? Is that mystic shrine within you painted with such figures as in some chambers in Pompeii, where the excavators had to cover up the pictures because they were so foul? Or, is it like the cells in the Convent of San Marco at Florence, where Fra Angelico’s holy and sweet genius painted on the bare walls, to be looked at, as he fancied, only by one devout brother, in each cell, angel imaginings, and noble, pure celestial faces that calm and hallow those who gaze upon them? What are you doing, my brother, in the dark, in the chambers of your imagery?

Everything which you do leaves its effect with you for ever, just as long-forgotten meals are in your blood and bones to-day. Every act that a man performs has printed itself upon his soul; it has become a part of himself; and, though, like a newly-painted picture, after a little while the colors go in, why is that? Only because they have entered into the very fiber of the canvas, and have left the surface because they are incorporated with the substance, and they want but a touch of varnish to flash out again.

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