THE POWER OF PURITY
Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.--SERMON ON THE
MOUNT.
My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure.
TENNYSON.
Virtue alone raises us above hopes, fears, and chances.--SENECA.
Even from the body's purity the mind
Receives a secret sympathetic aid.
THOMSON.
Purity is a broad word with a deep meaning. It denotes far more than
superficial cleanness. It goes below the surface of guarded speech and
polite manners to the very heart of being. "Out of the heart are the
issues of life." Make the fountain clean and the waters that flow from
it will be pure and limpid. Make the heart clean and the life will be
clean.
Purity is defined as "free from contact with that which weakens,
impairs or pollutes." How forceful then is the converse of the
definition: Impurity weakens, impairs, and pollutes. It weakens both
mind and body. It impairs the health. It pollutes not only the
thoughts but the conduct which inevitably has its beginning and its end
in thought.
Innocence is the state of natural purity. It was the state of Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden. When they sinned "they knew that they were
naked." They lost innocence never to regain it. But purity may be
attained. As an unclean garment may be washed, so the heart may be
purified and made clean. Ghosts of past impurities still may dog us,
but they are ghosts that may be laid with an imperative "Get thee
behind me, Satan." They are like the lions that affrighted Bunyan's
pilgrim--chained securely. They may roar and threaten, but they are
powerless if we deny their power. The man who is striving for purity
whole-heartedly is like one who sits safely in a guarded house. Old
memories of evil things like specters may peer in at the windows and
mow and gibber at him, but they can not touch him unless he gives them
power, unless he unlocks the door of his heart and bids them enter.
As the lotus flower grows out of the mud, so may purity and beauty
spring up from even the vilest past if we but will it so.
As purity is power so impurity is impotence, weakness, degeneracy.
Many a man goes on in an impure career thinking himself secure,
thinking his secret hidden. But impurity, like murder, will out.
There was a noted pugilist who was unexpectedly defeated in a great
ring battle. People said the fight was a "fake," that it was a "put up
job." But those who knew said "impurity." He had lived an evil,
debauched life for several years, and he went into the ring impaired in
strength, weakened by his transgressions of the law of pure living.
Purity is power; impurity is weakness.
There is a saying of Scripture which is absolutely scientific: "Be sure
your sin will find you out." Note this; it is not that your sin will
be found out, but _your_ sin will find _you_ out. Sin recoils on the
sinner, and of all sins that surely find us out, the sins against
purity are the most certain to bring retribution.
Young men do not think that listening to an off-color story, or
anything that is vulgar, can injure them much, and, for fear of
ridicule, they laugh when they hear anything of the kind, even when it
is repulsive to them, and when they loathe it. It is a rare thing for
a young man to express with emphasis his disapproval. To know life
properly is to know the best in it, not the worst. No one ever yet was
made stronger by his knowledge of impurity or experience in sin.
_It is said that the mind's phonograph will faithfully reproduce a bad
story even up to the point of death_. Do not listen once. You can
never get the stain entirely out of your life. Your character will
absorb the poison. Impurity is especially fatal in its grip upon the
young, because of the vividness of the youthful imagination and the
facility with which insinuating suggestions enter the youthful thought.
Our court records show that a very large percentage of criminals began
their downfall through the fatal contagion of impurity communicated
from various associations.
Remember that you can not tell what may come to you in the future, what
honor or promotion; and you can not afford to take chances upon having
anything in your history which can come up to embarrass you or to keep
you back. A thing which you now look upon as a bit of pleasure may
come up in the future to hamper your progress. The thing you do to-day
while trying to have a good time may come up to block your progress
years afterwards.
I know men who have been thrust into positions of honor and public
trust who would give anything in the world if they could blot out some
of the unclean experiences of their youth. Things in their early
history, which they had forgotten all about and which they never
expected to hear from again, are raked up when they become candidates
for office or positions of trust. These forgotten bits of so-called
pleasure loom up in after-life as insurmountable bars across their
pathway.
I know a very rich young man who thought he was just having a good time
in his youth--sowing his wild oats--who would give a large part of his
vast wealth to-day if he could blot out a few years of his folly.
It seems strange that men will work hard to build a reputation, and
then throw it all away by some weakness in their character. How many
men there are in this country with great brain power, men who are kings
in their specialties, men who have worked like slaves to achieve their
aims, whose reputations have been practically ruined by the flaw of
impurity!
Character is a record of our thoughts and acts. That which we think
about most, the ideals and motives uppermost in our mind, are
constantly solidifying into character. What we are constantly thinking
about, and aiming toward and trying to obtain becomes a permanent part
of the life.
The man whose thoughts are low and impure, very quickly gives this bent
and tendency to his character.
The character levels itself with the thought, whether high or low. No
man can have a pure, clean character who does not habitually have pure,
clean thoughts. The immoral man is invariably an impure
thinker--whatever we harbor in the mind out-pictures itself in the body.
In Eastern countries the leper is compelled to cry, "Unclean, unclean,"
upon the approach of any one not so cursed. What a blessing to
humanity if our modern moral lepers were compelled to cry, "Unclean,
unclean," before they approach innocent victims with their deadly
contagion!
About the vilest thing on earth is a human being whose character is so
tainted with impurity that he leaves the slimy trail of the serpent
wherever he goes.
There never was a more beautiful and pathetic prayer than that of the
poor soiled, broken-hearted Psalmist in his hour of shame, "Create in
me a clean heart." "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, who
shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure
heart." There are thousands of men who would cut off their right hands
to-day to be free from the stain, the poison, of impurity.
There can be no lasting greatness without purity. Vice honeycombs the
physical strength as well as destroys the moral fiber. Now and again
some man of note topples with a crash to sudden ruin. Yet the cause of
the moral collapse is not sudden. There has been a slow undermining of
virtue going on probably for years; then, in an hour when honor, truth,
or honesty is brought to a crucial test, the weakened character gives
way and there is an appalling commercial or social crash which often
finds an echo in the revolver shot of the suicide.
Tennyson shows the effect of Launcelot's guilty love for Guinevere, in
the great knight's conscious loss of power. His wrongful passion
indirectly brought about the death of fair Elaine. He himself at times
shrank from puny men wont to go down before the shadow of his spear.
Like a scarlet blot his sin stains all his greatness, and he muses on
it remorsefully:
"For what am I? What profits me my name
Of greatest knight? I fought for it and have it.
Pleasure to have it, none; to lose it pain;
Now grown a part of me: but what use in it?
To make men worse by making my sin known?
Or sin seem less, the sinner seeming great?"
Later when the knights of the Round Table joined in the search for the
Holy Grail, that lost sacred vessel,
"The cup, the cup itself from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own,"
Launcelot was overtaken by his sin and failed ignominiously. Only
Galahad the Pure was permitted to see the cup unsurrounded by a
blinding glory, a fearful splendor of watching eyes and guarding shapes.
No one is quite the same in his own estimation when he has been once
guilty of contact with impurity. His self-respect has suffered a loss.
Something has gone out of his life. His own good opinion of himself
has suffered deterioration, and he can never face his life-task with
quite the same confidence again. Somehow he feels that the world will
know of his soul's debauch and judge him accordingly.
There is nothing which will mar a life more quickly than the
consciousness of a soul-stain. The loss of self-respect, the loss of
character, is irreparable.
We are beginning to find that there is an intimate connection between
absolute purity _of one's thought and life and his good health, good
thinking, and good work_, a very close connection between the moral
faculties and the physical health; that nothing so exhausts vitality
and vitiates the quality of work and ideals, so takes the edge off of
one's ambition, dulls the brain and aspiration, as impurity of thought
and life. It seems to blight all the faculties and to demoralize the
whole man, so that his efficiency is very much lessened. He does not
speak with the same authority. The air of the conqueror disappears
from his manner. He does not think so clearly; he does not act with so
great certainty, and his self-faith is lost, because confidence is
based upon self-respect, and he can no longer respect himself when he
does things which he would not respect in another.
The fact that his impure acts are done secretly makes no difference.
No one can thoroughly respect himself when he does that which
demoralizes him, which is unbecoming a gentleman, no matter whether
other people know it or not. Impurity blights everything it touches.
It is not enough to be thought pure and clean and sound. One must
actually _be_ pure and clean and sound morally, or his self-respect is
undermined.
_Purity is power because it means integrity of thought, integrity of
conduct_. _It means wholeness_. The impure man can not be a great
power, because he can not thoroughly believe in himself when conscious
that he is rotten in any part of his nature. Impurity works like
leaven, which affects everything in a man. The very consciousness that
the impurity is working within him robs him of power.
Apart from the moral side of this question, let us show how these
things affect one's success in life by sapping the energies, weakening
the nature, lowering one's standards, blurring one's ideals,
discouraging one's ambition, and lessening one's vitality and power.
In the last analysis of success, the mainspring of achievement must
rest in the strength of one's vitality, for, without a stock of health
equal to great emergencies and persistent longevity, even the greatest
ambition is comparatively powerless. And there is nothing that will
sap the life-forces so quickly as dissipation and impure living.
Is there anything truer than that "To be carnally minded is death?" If
the thought is carnal, the body must correspond, must express it in
some physical discord.
Nothing else will destroy the very foundations of vitality quicker than
impurity of thought and animal self-indulgence. The ideals must be
kept bright and the ambition clean-cut.
Purity of thought means that the mental processes are not clouded,
muddy, or clogged by brain ash from a dissipated life, from violation
of the laws of health. Pure thought comes from pure blood, and pure
blood from a clean, sane life. Purity signifies a great deal besides
freedom from sensual taint. It means saneness, purity, and quality.
It has been characteristic of great leaders, men whose greatness has
stood the acid test of time, that they have been virtuous in conduct,
pure in thought.
"I have such a rich story that I want to tell you," said an officer,
who one evening came into the Union camp in a rollicking mood. "There
are no ladies present, are there?"
General Grant, lifting his eyes from the paper which he was reading,
and looking the officer squarely in the eye, said slowly and
deliberately:
"No, but there are gentlemen present."
"A great trait of Grant's character," said George W. Childs, "was his
purity. I never heard him express an impure thought, or make an
indelicate allusion in any way or shape. There is nothing I ever heard
him say that could not be repeated in the presence of women. If a man
was brought up for an appointment, and it was shown that he was an
immoral man, Grant would not appoint him, no matter how great the
pressure brought to bear."
On one occasion, when Grant formed one of a dinner-party of Americans
in a foreign city, conversation drifted into references to questionable
affairs, when he suddenly rose and said, "Gentlemen, please excuse me,
I will retire."
It is the glory of a man to have clean lips and a clean mind. It is
the glory of a woman not to know evil, even in her thoughts.
Isaac Newton's most intimate friend in young manhood was a noted
foreign chemist. They were constant associates until one day the
Italian told an impure story, after which Newton never would associate
with him.
"My extreme youth, when I took command of the army of Italy," said
Napoleon, "rendered it necessary that I should evince great reserve of
manners and the utmost severity of morals. This was indispensable to
enable me to sustain authority over men so greatly my superiors in age
and experience. I pursued a line of conduct in the highest degree
irreproachable and exemplary. In spotless morality I was a Cato, and
must have appeared such to all. I was a philosopher and a sage. My
supremacy could be retained only by proving myself a better man than
any other man in the army. Had I yielded to human weakness, I should
have lost my power."
The military antagonist and conqueror of Napoleon, the Duke of
Wellington, was a man of simple life and austere virtue. When he was
laid to rest in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, "in streaming
London's central roar," the poet who wrote his funeral ode was able to
say of him:
"Whatever record leap to light
He never shall be shamed."
The peril of impurity lies in the insidiousness of the poison. Just
one taint of impurity, one glance at a lewd picture, one hearing of an
unclean story may begin the fatal corruption of mind and heart.
"It is the little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute,
The little rift within the lover's lute
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit
That rotting inward slowly molders all."
When Bunyan's pilgrim was assailed by temptation he stopped his ears
with his fingers and fled for his life. Let the young man who values
himself, who sets store upon health and has ambition to succeed in his
chosen career, be deaf to unclean speech and flee the companionship of
those who think and speak uncleanness.
It is the experience of every man who has forsaken vice and turned his
feet into the paths of virtue that evil memories will, in his holiest
hours, leap upon him like a lion from ambush. Into the harmony of the
hymn he sings memory will interpolate unbidden, the words of some
sensual song. Pictures of his debauches, his past licentiousness, will
fill his vision, and the unhappy victim can only beat upon his breast
and cry, "Me miserable! Whither shall I flee?" This has been, through
all time, the experience of the men that have sought sanctity in
seclusion. The saints, the hermits in their caves, the monks in their
cells, could never escape the obsessions of memory which with horrible
realism and scorching vividness revived past scenes of sin.
A boy once showed to another a book of impure words and pictures. He
to whom the book was shown had it in his hands only a few minutes. In
after-life he held high office in the church, and years and years
afterwards told a friend that he would give half he possessed had he
never seen it, because its impure images, at the most holy times, would
arise unbidden to his mind.
Physicians tell us that every particle of the body changes in a very
few years; but no chemistry, human or divine, can entirely expunge from
the mind a bad picture. Like the paintings buried for centuries in
Pompeii, without the loss of tint or shade, these pictures are as
brilliant in age as in youth.
Association begets assimilation. We can not mix with evil associations
without being contaminated; can not touch pitch without being defiled.
Impurity is especially fatal in its grip upon the young, because of the
vividness of the youthful imagination and the facility with which
insinuating suggestions enter the youthful thought.
Indelible and satanic is the taint of the evil suggestive power which a
lewd, questionable picture or story leaves upon the mind. Nothing else
more fatally mars the ideals of life and lowers the standard of manhood
and womanhood.
To read writers whose lines express the utmost possible impurity so
dexterously and cunningly that not a vulgar word is used, but rosy,
glowing, suggestive language--authors who soften evil and show
deformity with the tints of beauty--what is this but to take the feet
out of the straight road into the guiltiest path of seduction?
Very few realize the power of a diseased imagination to ruin a precious
life. Perhaps the defect began in a little speck of taint. No other
faculty has such power to curse or bless mankind, to build up or tear
down, to ennoble or debauch, to make happy or miserable, or has such
power upon our destiny, as the imagination.
Many a ruined life began its downfall in the dry rot of a perverted
imagination. How little we realize that by subtle, moral manufacture,
repeated acts of the imagination weave themselves into a mighty
tapestry, every figure and fancy of which will stand out in living
colors in the character-web of our lives, to approve or condemn us.
In many cases where, for no apparent reason, one is making failure
after failure, never reaching, even approximately, the position which
was anticipated for him, if he would look frankly into his own heart,
and searchingly at his own secret habits, he would find that which,
hidden, like the worm at the heart of the rose, is destroying and
making impossible all that ennobles, beautifies, and enriches life.
"I solemnly warn you," says Beecher, "against indulging a morbid
imagination. In that busy and mischievous faculty begins the evil.
Were it not for his airy imagination, man might stand his own
master,--not overmatched by the worst part of himself. But ah! these
summer reveries, these venturesome dreams, these fairy castles, builded
for no good purposes,--they are haunted by impure spirits, who will
fascinate, bewitch, and corrupt you. Blessed are the pure in heart.
Blessed art thou, most favored of God, whose THOUGHTS are chastened;
whose imagination will not breathe or fly in tainted air, and whose
path hath been measured by the golden reed of purity."
To be pure in heart is the youth's first great commandment. Do not
listen to men who tell you that "vice is a necessity." Nothing is a
necessity that is wrong,--that debauches self-respect. "All wickedness
is weakness." Vice and vigor have nothing in common. Purity is
strength, health, power.
Do not imagine that impurity can be hidden! One may as well expect to
have consumption or any other deadly disease, and to look and appear
healthy, as to be impure in thought and mind, and to look and appear
manly and noble souled. Character writes its record in the flesh.
"No, no, these are not trifles," said George Whitefield, when a friend
asked why he was so particular to bathe frequently, and always have his
linen scrupulously clean; "a minister must be without spot, even in his
garments." Purity in a good man can not be carried too far.
There is a permanency in the stamp left by the sins resulting from
impure thought that follows even to the grave. Diseases unnameable,
the consequences of the Scarlet Sin, the following after the "strange
woman," write their record in the very bones, literally fulfilling the
Scripture statement--"Their sins shall lie down with their bones in the
dust."
We often detect in the eye and in the manner the black leper spots of
impurity long before the youth suspects they have ever been noticed.
When there is a scar or a stain upon one's self-respect it is bound to
appear on the surface sooner or later. What fearful blots and stains
are left on the characters of those who have to fight for a lifetime to
rid themselves of a blighting and contaminating influence, moral or
physical!
Chemists tell us that scarlet is the only color which can not be
bleached. There is no known chemical which can remove it. So,
formerly, scarlet rags were made into blotting paper. When the sacred
writer wished to emphasize the power of Divine forgiveness, of Divine
love, he said: "Even though thy sins be as scarlet, they shall be made
white as wool!" It certainly takes omnipotent power to expunge
impurity from the mind. There is certainly one sin which only Divine
power can bleach out of the character--the sin of impurity.
No man can think much of himself when he is conscious of impurity
anywhere in his life. And the very knowledge that one is absolutely
pure in his thought and clean in his life increases his self-respect
and his self-faith wonderfully.
It is a terrible handicap to be conscious that, however much others may
think of us, we are foul inside, that our thoughts are vile. It does
not matter that our vicious acts are secret, we can not cover them.
Whatever we have thought or done will outpicture itself in the
expression, in the bearing. It will be hung out upon the bulletin
board of the face and manner for the world to read. We instinctively
feel a person's reality; not what he pretends, but what he is, for we
radiate our reality, which often contradicts our words.
There is only one panacea for impurity. Constant occupation and pure,
high thinking are absolutely necessary to a clean life.
"I should be a poor counselor of young men," wrote a true friend of
youth, "if I taught you that purity is possible only by isolation from
the world. We do not want that sort of holiness which can thrive only
in seclusion; we want that virile, manly purity which keeps itself
unspotted from the world, even amid its worst debasements, just as the
lily lifts its slender chalice of white and gold to heaven, untainted
by the soil in which it grows, though that soil be the reservoir of
death and putrefaction."
Impurity is the forfeiture of manliness. The true man must be
untarnished. James went so far as to declare that this is just what
religion is. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is
this * * to keep himself unspotted from the world."
Every true man shrinks from uncleanness. He knows what it means.
Impurity makes lofty friendships impossible. It robs all of life's
intercourse of its freshness and its joyous innocence. It sullies all
beauty. It does these things chiefly because it separates men from God
and His vision. The best and holiest is barred to the stained man.
Impurity makes it impossible for him to appreciate what is pure and
fine, dulls his finer perceptions, and he is not given the place where
only pure and fine things are.
[Illustration: Helen Keller]
There can be no such thing as an impure gentleman. The two words
contradict each other. A gentleman must be pure. He need not have
fine clothes. He may have had few advantages. But he must be pure and
clean. And, if he have all outward grace and gift and be inwardly
unclean, though he may call himself a gentleman, he is a liar and a lie.
O, young man, guard your heart-purity! Keep innocency! Never lose it;
if it be gone, you have lost from the casket the most precious gift of
God. The first purity of imagination, of thought, and of feeling, if
soiled, can be cleansed by no fuller's soap. If a harp be broken, art
may repair it; if a light be quenched, the flame may kindle it; but if
a flower be crushed, what art can repair it? If an odor be wafted
away, who can collect or bring it back?
Parents are, in many cases, responsible for the impurity of their
children. Through a mistaken sense of delicacy, they allow the
awakened, searching mind of the child to get information concerning its
physical nature from the mind of some boy or girl no better taught than
itself, and so conceive wholly wrong and harmful ideas concerning
things of which it is vitally important that every human being should
at the outset of life have clear and adequate ideas. Such silence,
many times, is fatal, and always foolish, if not criminal.
"I have noticed," says William Acton, "that all patients who have
confessed to me that they have practised vice, lamented that they were
not, when children, made aware of its consequences; and I have been
pressed over and over again to urge on parents, guardians,
schoolmasters, and others interested in the education of youth, the
necessity of giving to their charges some warning, some intimation, of
their danger. To parents and guardians I offer my earnest advice that
they should, by hearty sympathy and frank explanation, aid their
charges in maintaining pure lives." What stronger breastplate than a
heart untainted?
A prominent writer says: "If young persons poison their bodies and
corrupt their minds with vicious courses, no lapse of time, after a
reform, is likely to restore them to physical soundness and the soul
purity of their earlier days."
There is one idea concerning purity which should never have been
conceived, and, having been conceived, should be, once and forever,
eternally exploded. It is that purity is different in the different
sexes.
It would be loosening the foundations of virtue to countenance the
notion that, because of a difference in sex, men are at liberty to set
morality at defiance, and to do with impunity that which, if done by a
woman, would stain her character for life. To maintain a pure and
virtuous condition of society, therefore, man as well as woman must be
virtuous and pure, both alike shunning all acts infringing on the
heart, character, and conscience,--shunning them as poison, which, once
imbibed, can never be entirely thrown out again.
Is there any reason why a man should have any license to drag his
thoughts through the mud and filth any more than a woman? Is there any
sex in principle? Isn't a stain a blot upon a boy's character just as
bad as upon a girl's? If purity is so refining and elevating for one
sex, why should it not be for the other?
It is incredible that a man should be socially ostracized for
comparatively minor offenses, yet be rotten with immorality and be
received into the best homes. But, if a woman makes the least false
step in this direction, she is not only ostracized but treated with the
utmost contempt, while the man who was the chief sinner in causing a
woman's downfall, society will pardon.
To put it on the very lowest ground, I am certain that if young men
knew and realized the fearful risks to health that they take by
indulging in gross impurities they would put them by with a shudder of
disgust and aversion. It may very easily happen--it very often
actually does happen--that one single step from the path of purity
clouds a man's whole life with misery and unspeakable suffering; and
not only that, but even entails lifelong disease on children yet unborn.
To return to its Maker at the close of life the marvelous body which He
gave us, scarred by a heedless life, with the heart rotten with
impurity, the imagination filled with vicious images, the character
honeycombed with vice, is a most ungrateful return for the priceless
life of opportunity.
A mind retaining all the dew and freshness of innocence shrinks from
the very idea of impurity, the very suggestion of it, as if it were sin
to have even thought or heard of it, as if even the shadow of the evil
would leave some soil on the unsullied whiteness of the virgin mind.
"When modesty is once extinguished, it knows not a return."