Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Meditation

Frequency in heavenly contemplation is particularly important to prevent a shyness between God and thy soul.

There is scarce anything that nature has made, or that men do suffer, whence the devout reflector cannot take an occasion of an aspiring meditation.

For meditation is, I presume, that act of the mind by which it seeks within, either the law of the phenomena which it has contemplated without, or semblances, symbols, and analogies corresponsive to the same.

Meditation is the soul’s perspective glass; whereby, in her long remove, she discerneth God as if he were nearer hand. I persuade no man to make it his whole life’s business. We have bodies as well as souls; and even this world, while we are in it, ought somewhat to be cared for. As those states are likely to flourish where execution follows sound advisements, so is man when contemplation is seconded by action.

It is not, I suppose, a more bold than profitable labour, after the endeavours of so many contemplative men to teach the art of meditation: an heavenly business as any belongeth either to man or Christian, and such as whereby the soul doth unspeakably benefit itself.

Let us beseech you then to make them [religion and eternity] familiar with your minds, and mingle them with the ordinary stream of your thoughts: retiring often from the world, and conversing with God and your own souls. In these solemn moments, nature, and the shifting scenes of it, will retire from your view, and you will feel yourselves left alone with God; you will walk as in his sight; you will stand, as it were, at his tribunal. Illusions will then vanish apace, and everything will appear in its true proportion and proper colour. You will estimate human life, and the work of it, not by fleeting and momentary sensations, but by the light of reflection and steady faith. You will see little in the past to please, or in the future to flatter: its feverish dreams will subside and its enchantment be dissolved.

Meditation will radicate these seeds, fix the transient gleam of light and warmth, confirm resolutions of good, and give them a double consistence in the soul.

A constant residence amidst noise and pleasure invariably obliterates the impressions of piety, and a frequent abstraction of ourselves into a state, where this life, like the next, operates only upon the reason, will reinstate religion in its just authority, even without those irradiations from above, the hope of which I have no intention to withdraw from the sincere and the diligent.

A man used to such sort of reflections sees as much at one glimpse as would require a long discourse to lay before another and make out in one entire and gradual deduction.

Frequent consideration of a thing wears off the strangeness of it; and shows it in its several lights, and various ways of appearance, to the view of the mind.

There can be no study without time; and the mind must abide and dwell upon things, or be always a stranger to the inside of them.

Meditate till you make some act of piety upon the occasion of what you meditate: either get some new arguments against a sin or some new encouragements to virtue.

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit; and our wandering thoughts in prayer are but the neglects of meditation and recessions from that duty; and according as we neglect meditation so are our prayers imperfect,—meditation being the soul of prayer and the intention of our spirit.

Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation must form our judgment.

We must learn to be deaf and regardless of other things besides the present subject of our meditation.