Regulating Our Love

It is as necessary, in the progress and support of a holy life, to regulate our friendships and our love, (we mean here our love of creatures,) as it is to regulate our displeasure and anger. We may as really love too much and sin, as we may be displeased too much and sin. The holy mind may be said, with a degree of propriety, to stand in a state of indifference, relatively to  itself.  That is to say, it seeks nothing, desires nothing, loves nothing, is averse from nothing, and is angry with nothing, except in God's time and way, IN God and FOR God.

— Religious Maxims (1846) CXXXIX.

Choosing to Be Where You Are

One  of those things which particularly characterizes the holy mind, in distinction from the unholy or natural mind, and also in distinction from the partially sanctified mind, is, that in the allotment which falls to it in life,  it chooses to be, and loves to be, where it is; and has no disposition and no desire to be any where else, till the providence of God clearly indicates that the time has come for a removal.

— Religious Maxims (1846) CXXXII.

A Holy Imagination

How pleasant, how delightful is a holy imagination! It instinctively refuses and throws away every thing that can defile. It is a sort of inner sanctuary; or perhaps we may call it the bridal chamber of the soul, fitted up and adorned with every thing pure in earth and beautiful in heaven. And God himself is the bright light thereof.

— Religious Maxims (1846) LVIII.

The Living Temple

The Temple once, which brightly shone
On proud Moriah's rocky brow;
Not there doth God erect His throne,
And build His place of beauty now.

The sunbeam of the orient day
Saw nought on earth more bright and fair;
But desolation swept away,
And left no form of glory there.

But God, who rear'd that chisel'd stone,
Now builds upon a higher plan;
And rears the columns of His  throne,
His  temple in the heart of man.

Oh man, Oh woman! know it well,
Nor seek elsewhere His place to find,
That God doth in the Temple dwell,
The temple of the holy mind.

— from Christ in the Soul (1872) II.