United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If, therefore, there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence for or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for man and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire for the purification of the understanding, we must entreat men again and again to discard, or at least set apart for a while, these volatile and preposterous philosophies which have preferred theses to hypotheses, led experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God; and to approach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity.
His great faith had not suffered; for the rigid face was serene, as though he had accepted this final chastisement and purification before entrance into the Eternal Kingdom; but his high pride, the mainspring of his fanatical life, had been broken and the workings of the physical organism had been arrested.
A pure-minded person, by purification of his heart, is able to destroy the good and evil effect of his actions and attains eternal beatitude by the enlightenment of his inward spirit. That state of peace and purification of heart is likened to the state of a person who in a cheerful state of mind sleeps soundly, or the brilliance of a lamp trimmed by a skillful hand.
Nobody shall approach the waters of Castaly save upon stilts; and whoever may giggle, as he takes his physic, shall be put upon a dreadfully plentiful allowance of Guieciardini for bread, and of the poems of for water. But, alas! Brother Bobus, where to begin our purification, and where to end it?
I reflect how from the very nature of the purification of the soul this darkness, bitterness, and desolation must be; but not a drop of consolation is distilled into my soul. The only words which come to my lips are 'My soul is sad unto death, and these I repeat and repeat again.
They recorded nine and twenty moments in the life of his passion, from the day of its birth up to the present hour, the hour of its purification. For it was still young in him; though at this distance of time Lucia's image was no longer one and indivisible. He had come to think of her as two persons clothed mysteriously in the same garment of flesh.
They are sanctified by the purification of their own actions, and consequently sin in them dies out of itself. This virtue of good conduct is wonderful, ancient, immutable and eternal; and wise men observing this virtue with holiness, attain to heaven.
The essence, then, of repentance and purification of character consists first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our instinctive powers and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic desires and dedication to new purposes.
It declares that she alone has penetrated into the spaces of unknown sorrows, and that she has disentangled and taken hold of the joys; she has in fact succeeded in reconciling two contraries which seemed eternally repugnant; the suffering of the soul in its purification from sin, and the joy of the same soul, which at the very moment it is enduring frightful torment experiences immense happiness, for little by little it draws near to God, and feels His rays attract it more and more, and His love inundate it with such excess, that it would seem the Saviour desires nought but only it.
But it is a strange nemesis of history that the sense of physical pollution should develop a religious rite fitted to become the very means for the dissemination of physical pollution and disease. Japanese personal cleanliness is often connected in the descriptions of foreigners with ceremonial purification, but the facts are much exaggerated.
Word Of The Day