Possession of The Heart

Persons that are well affected to religion, that receive instructions of piety with pleasure and satisfaction, often wonder how it comes to pass that they make no greater progress in that religion which they so admire.

Now the reason of it is this: it is because religion lives only in their head, but something else has possession of their heart; and therefore they continue from year to year mere admirers and praisers of piety, without ever coming up to the reality and perfection of its precepts.

If it be asked why religion does not get possession of their hearts, the reason is this; it is not because they live in gross sins or debaucheries, for their regard to religion preserves them from such disorders; but it is because their hearts are constantly employed, perverted, and kept in a wrong state by the indiscreet use of such things as are lawful to be used.

The use and enjoyment of their estate is lawful and therefore it never comes into their heads to imagine any great danger from that quarter. They never reflect that there is a vain and imprudent use of their estate, which, though it does not destroy like gross sins, yet so disorders the heart and supports it in such sensuality and dullness, such pride and vanity, as makes it incapable of receiving the life and spirit of piety.

For our souls may receive an infinite hurt and be rendered incapable of all virtue, merely by the use of innocent and lawful things.

[We] may live free from debaucheries, [we] may be friends of religion so far as to praise and speak well of it and admire it in [our] imaginations; but it cannot govern [our] hearts and be the spirit of [our] actions till [we] change [our] way of life and let religion give laws to the use and spending of [our] estate.

More people are kept from a true sense and taste of religion by a regular kind of sensuality and indulgence than by gross drunkenness. More men live regardless of the great duties of piety through too great a concern for worldly goods than through direct injustice.

Would we therefore make a real progress in religion, we must not only abhor gross and notorious sins, but we must regulate the innocent and lawful parts of our behavior and put the most common and allowed actions of life under the rules of discretion and piety.

-from A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law