ughts and
intents and imaginations of his heart? How shall I, how shall you, my
brethren, ever have 'Think-well' written on our forehead?--Well, with God
all things are possible. With God, with a much meditating mind, and a
true and humble and tender heart, and a pure conscience, a conscience
void of offence, working together with Him--He, with all these
inheritances and all these environments working together with Him, will
at last enable us, you and me, to lift up such a clear and transparent
forehead. But not without our constant working together. We must
ourselves make head, and heart, and, especially, conscience of all our
thoughts--for a long lifetime we must do that. The _Ductor Dubitantium_
has a deep chapter on 'The Thinking Conscience.' And what a reproof to
many of us lies in the mere name! For how much evil-thinking and evil-
speaking we have all been guilty of through our unthinking conscience and
through a zeal for God, but a zeal without knowledge. Look back at the
history of the Church and see; look back at your own history in the
Church and see. Yes, make conscience of your thoughts: but let it first
be an instructed conscience, a thinking conscience, a conscience full of
the best and the clearest light. And then let us also make ourselves a
new heart and a new spirit, as Ezekiel has it. For our hearts are
continually perverting and polluting and poisoning our thoughts. That is
a fearful thing that is said about the men on whom the flood soon came.
You remember what is said about them, and in explanation and
justification of the flood. God saw, it is said, that every imagination
of the thoughts of their hearts was evil, and only evil continually.
Fearful! Far more fearful than ten floods! O God, Thou seest us. And
Thou seest all the imaginations of the thoughts of our hearts. Oh give
us all a mind and a heart and a conscience to think of nothing, to fear
nothing, to watch and to pray about nothing compared with our thoughts.
'As for my secret thoughts,' says the author of the _Holy War_ and the
creator of Master Think-well--'As for my secret thoughts, I paid no
attention to them. I never knew I had them. I had no pain, or shame, or
guilt, or horror, or despair on account of them till John Gifford took me
and showed me the way.' And then when John Bunyan, being the man of
genius he was,--as soon as he began to attend to his own secret thoughts,
then the first faint outline of this fine