' We can choose
almost all things. Our will and choice have almost all things at their
disposal. We can choose our God. We can choose life or death. We can
choose heaven or hell. We can choose our church, our minister, our
books, our companions, our words, our works, and, to some extent, our
inward thoughts, but only to some extent. We can encourage this or that
thought; we can entertain it and dwell upon it; or we can detect it,
detest it, and cast it out. But that secret place in our heart where our
thoughts hide and harbour, and out of which they spring so suddenly upon
the mind and the heart, the imagination and the conscience,--of that
secretest of all secret places, God alone is able to say, I search the
heart. 'As for secret thoughts,' says our author, speaking of his own
former religious life, 'I took no notice of them, neither did I
understand what Satan's temptations were, nor how they were to be
withstood and resisted.' But now all these things are his deepest grief,
as they are ours,--as many of us as have been truly turned in our deepest
hearts to God.
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