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ABOVE all we ought at least to know that there are three origins of our
thoughts, i.e., from God, from the devil, and from ourselves. They come
from God when He vouchsafes to visit us with the illumination of the Holy
Ghost, lifting us up to a higher state of progress, and where we have made
but little progress, or through acting slothfully have been overcome, He
chastens us with most salutary compunction, or when He discloses to us
heavenly mysteries, or turns our purpose and will to better actions, as in
the case where the king Ahasuerus, being chastened by the Lord, was
prompted to ask for the books of the annals, by which he was reminded of
the good deeds of Mordecai, and promoted him to a position of the highest
honour and at once recalled his most cruel sentence concerning the
slaughter of the Jews. Or when the prophet says: " will hearken what the
Lord God will say in me." Another too tells us "And an angel spoke, and
said in me," or when the Son of God promised that He would come with His
Father, and make His abode in us, and "It is not ye that speak, but the
Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." And the chosen vessel: Ye
seek a proof of Christ that speaketh in me." But a whole range of
thoughts springs from the devil, when he endeavours to destroy us either by
the pleasures of sin or by secret attacks, in his crafty wiles deceitfully
showing us evil as good, and transforming himself into an angel of light to
us: as when the evangelist tells us: "And when supper was ended, when
the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son,
to betray" the Lord: and again also "after the sop," he says, "Satan
entered into him." Peter also says to Ananias: "Why hath Satan tempted
thine heart, to lie to the Holy Ghost?" And that which we read in the
gospel much earlier as predicted by Ecclesiastes: "If the spirit of the
ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place." That too which is
said to God against Ahab in the third book of Kings, in the character of an
unclean spirit: "I will go forth and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of
all his prophets." But they arise from ourselves, when in the course of
nature we recollect what we are doing or have done or have heard. Of which
the blessed David speaks: "I thought upon the ancient days, and had in mind
the years from of old, and I meditated, by night I exercised myself with my
heart, and searched out my spirit." And again: "the Lord knoweth the
thoughts of man, that they are vain:" and "the thoughts of the
righteous are judgments." In the gospel too the Lord says to the
Pharisees: "why do ye think evil in your hearts?"
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