Wholly Sanctified # 14

A Sanctified Soul


We have already seen in the threefold division of our being that the spirit represents the higher and divine element that knows, trusts, loves, resembles and glorifies God. What then is the soul as distinguished from the spirit and the body, and what is meant by a soul wholly sanctified?


The Nature and Attributes of the Soul


It is not necessary for us to descend into all the depths of psychology and attempt to analyze the manifold attributes and faculties of that wondrous consciousness which God has placed within the breast of every human being. It is enough for the present to observe that every one of us is conscious of, at least, the following four great classes of mental endowment - understanding, tastes, affections, and passions and appetites.


The understanding is the seat of intelligence.  many and varied are the chambers in this house. Perhaps primary is that which the philosophers have called perception that fixes its attention upon objects and becomes directly cognizant of things and thoughts.


Next might be intelligence - acquiring knowledge, understanding truth and relations, reasoning, thinking and concluding. To this department also belongs memory, a wondrous attribute that recalls the past and stores up forever the impressions and sensations of the mind to be the source of joy or pain.


Imagination follows next. This faculty gives the soul the power of ignoring space, bringing the distant near and peopling the empty void with the creations of an ideal world that seems as read as the material forms around it.


As the correlative of memory, expectation looks out upon the future with the magnifying glass of imagination. It springs forward on the wings of hope, till time and sense are forgotten in the prospect f the bright vista that opens before.


Amid all this, as the helm of character and the driver of the fiery coursers of the soul, sits reason or judgment - the faculty of comparing or concluding, weighing instructions and deciding courses of action. Sometimes it is called common sense; other times, the exercise of judgment.


All these are but a few of the mental qualities of which each of us is conscious, and which constitute the leading attributes of the soul. When we think how much they have to do with every interest of human life, it is not necessary to show how important it is that they should be sanctified so as to be guarded from error and perversion and used for their highest ends - the glory of God, the good of others and our welfare.


~A. B. Simpson~


(continued with # 15)