The Place of Thought in the Making of Character
American National Preacher
Jeremiah 4:14
O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved. How long shall your vain thoughts lodge within you?


Anyone who has visited lime stone caves has noticed the stalactite pillars, sometimes large and massive, by which they are adorned and supported. They are nature's masonry of solid rock formed by her own slow, silent, and mysterious process. The little drop of water percolates through the roof of the cavern and deposits its sediment, and another follows it, till the icicle of stone is formed, and finally reaching to the rock beneath, it becomes a solid pillar, a marble monument which can only be rent down by the most powerful forces. But is there not going forward oftentimes in the caverns of the human heart a process as silent and effective, yet infinitely more momentous? There in the darkness that shrouds all from the view of the outward observer, each thought and feeling, as light and inconsiderable perhaps as the little drops of water, sinks downward into the soul, and deposits — yet in a form almost imperceptible — what we may call its sediment. And then another and another follows, till the traces of all combined become more manifest; and if these thoughts and feelings are charged with the sediment of worldliness and worldly passion, then all around the walls of this spiritual cavern stand in massive proportions the pillars of sinful inclination and the props of iniquity, and only a convulsion like that which rends the solid globe can rend them from their place and shake their hold.

(American National Preacher.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee?

WEB: Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved. How long shall your evil thoughts lodge within you?




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