en, is the shortest way into your heart. Watch it well,
therefore; suspect and challenge all outsiders who come near it. Keep
the passes that lead to your heart with all diligence. Let nothing
contraband, let nothing that even looks suspicious, ever enter your
hearts; for, if it once enters, and turns out to be evil, you will never
get it all out again as long as you live. 'Death is come up into our
windows,' says our prophet in another place, 'and is entered into our
palaces, to cut off our children in our houses and our young men in our
streets.' Make a covenant, then, with your eyes. Take an oath of your
eyes as to which way they are henceforth to look. For, let them look
this way, and your heart is immediately full of lust, and hate, and envy,
and ill-will. On the other hand, lead them to look that way and your
heart is as immediately full of truth and beauty, brotherly kindness and
charity. The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be
single, thy whole body shall be full of light; but if thine eye be evil,
thy whole body is full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in
thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

CHAPTER V--THE KING'S PALACE

'The palace is not for man, but for the Lord God.'--_David_.

'Now, there is in this gallant country a fair and delicate town, a
corporation, called Mansoul: a town for its building so curious, for its
situation so commodious, for its privileges so advantageous, that I may
say of it, there is not its equal under the whole heaven. Also, there
was reared up in the midst of this town a most famous and stately palace:
for strength, it might be called a castle; for pleasantness, a paradise;
and for largeness, a place so copious as to contain all the world. This
place the King intended for Himself alone, and not for another with Him,
so great was His delight in it.' Thus far, our excellent allegorical
author. But there are other authors that treat of this great matter now
in hand besides the allegorical authors. You will hear tell sometimes
about a class of authors called the Mystics. Well, listen at this stage
to one of them, and one of the best of them, on this present matter--the
human heart, that is. 'Our heart,' he says, 'is our manner of existence,
or the state in which we feel ourselves to be; it is an inward life, a
vital sensibility, which contains our manner of feeling what and how we
are; it is the state of our desir