Page:Meditations For Every Day In The Year.djvu/461

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enabled to distinguish between true and false, solid and counterfeit good. " Many things are represented in false colors, which stand in need of being cleared, O Lord, by Your divine light." Christ, lastly, said to the man, " Go into thy house." Our house and our home is heaven, for, as St. Paul says, " You are fellow-citizens with the Saints, and the domestics of God." (Ephes. ii. 19.) Act therefore as a domestic of God and a son of light, for fear " the Lord strike thee with madness and blindness and fury of mind, and make thee grope at mid-day, as the blind is wont to grope in the dark, and not make straight thy ways." (Deu. xxviii. 28.)

FRIDAY.

Cure of the Lunatic Child.— I.

I. Consider the great tyranny, which the Devil exercises on the bodies of those whom God permits him to possess. In the case of the lunatic child, he dashed him against the ground, made him foam at the mouth, often cast him into the fire, and often into the water. If he be so tormenting in this life, what must he be in the next? In this world his hands are tied, but in the next he has complete possession of the poor sinner. Of this horrid empire in hell, the Prophet says, " The streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the ground thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch." (Is. xxxiv. 9.)

II. The Devil exercises a similar power in this world over sinners, who are subject to him. He makes them lunatic; that is, inconstant, like the moon, in their resolutions of reform. He renders them deaf to the inspira-