I. The text carries us into the region of thought. It recognises the responsibility of thinking. It presupposes the possibility of choosing and refusing in the entertainment of subjects. Most men know perfectly well that they can control thought; that they can "make the porter watch" the comings in as well as the goings out, the entrances of thought as well as the exits of action. But the remarkable thing in the text is the enlargement of the responsibility of the self-control from the nature and quality to what we may call the scale and size of the thoughts. He speaks not of low, but of high, thoughts, not of grovelling, but of soaring, imaginations, as the disallowed and discountenanced inmates.
II. And there can be no doubt that there is a danger in this direction. There are not only evil desires, sinful lustings, to make frightful havoc of the life and of the soul: there are also speculations and rovings of thought, which give no other warning of their nature than this, that they belong to districts and regions beyond and above us; that they are fatal to the quietness and the silence of the spirit; that they cannot be entertained without reawakening those restless and dissatisfied yearnings which were just beginning to still themselves on the bosom of infinite love. This is true: (1) in the ambitions of this life; (2) in religion.
III. The counsel of the text is the counsel of wisdom when it makes reverence, when it makes humility, the condition of all knowledge that is worth the name. It is quite possible, by a little mismanagement, by a little spoiling of the soul, to make the spiritual life intolerable. We may so educate and so discipline our own soul as that health shall be our reward. We may do the contrary. We may make ourselves fools, idiots, sceptics, atheists, if we will to do. so, and if we take the way.
IV. The refraining and quieting spoken of is not inconsistent with the utmost stretch of inquiry into the mysteries of nature, of humanity, of God. This, too, is fostered and strengthened by it. The difference is here: that while the man who exercises himself in great matters is apt first to isolate and then to idolize intellect, to imagine that mental processes alone can carry him into the deep things of God Himself, and that whatsoever cannot be logically demonstrated cannot be certainly true, the other not because he is afraid to seek, not because he dreads the breakdown of faith under the strain of reason, but because he remembers that the being which he possesses is a complex thing and must not be disjointed and taken to pieces in the very use of it for the highest of all conceivable purposes: the study of truth and of God summons all and each part of himself to accompany the march, and refuses to regard that as proved or that as disproved which at most is so by one piece or one bit of him. Reason and conscience, and heart and soul too, shall all enter into the search; and that which satisfies not each and all of these shall not be for him either truth, or religion, or heaven, or God.
C. J. Vaughan, My Son, Give Me Thine Heart,p. 231.