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Animals that live in two elements are awkward in both. Do we find it difficult, even after the most innocent and unexceptionable entertainments, to brace the soul for its devotions? Do not our pinions flap languidly as we attempt our upward flight? And is it not the case that many of the so-called amusements which men pursue are in the last degree unfavourable to those exercises, without a constant application to which the highest zones of religious experience, the snowy summits of a pure spirituality — those glistening peaks that are the first to catch the auroral glow of the rising Sun of Righteousness, and the last to lose His evening beams — cannot be reached and maintained? To spoil a harp, you need not rudely break its strings and batter its sounding-board. Remove it from one temperature to another, and the mischief is done. We cannot say that people are not hurt by these things because they are not made openly and scandalously vicious. I maintain that a man has sustained a dire and irreparable, though a subtle, and at first impalpable injury, when he has lost his spiritual tone.

(J. Halsey.)

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KJV: And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:

WEB: and when Yahweh your God shall deliver them up before you, and you shall strike them; then you shall utterly destroy them: you shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them;