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| Chapter XIX. Of the three origins of our thoughts.
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Chapter XIX.
Of the three origins of our thoughts.
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.1132
Or when the
prophet says: “I will hearken what the Lord God will say in
me.”1133
Another too
tells us “And an angel spoke, and said in me,”1134
or when the Son of God promised that He
would come with His Father, and make His abode in us,1135
and “It is not ye that speak, but
the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.”1136
And the chosen vessel: “Ye seek a
proof of Christ that speaketh in me.”1137
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:1138
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”1139
the Lord: and
again also “after the sop,” he says, “Satan entered
into him.”1140
Peter also says to
Ananias: “Why hath Satan tempted thine heart, to lie to the Holy
Ghost?”1141
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.”1142
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.”1143
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.”1144
| 1144 Ps. lxxvi.
(lxxvii.) 6, 7.
Scobebam(which Petschenig edits from the mss.) = scopebam, which is found in the
Gallican Psalter as in the old Latin in this passage. It is merely a
Latinized form of σκοπεῖν. | And again: “the Lord knoweth the
thoughts of man, that they are vain:”1145
and “the thoughts of the righteous are judgments.”1146
In the gospel too the Lord says to the
Pharisees: “why do ye think evil in your hearts?”1147
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