Romans 11:8

SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS

‘As it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear.’

Romans 11:8

The blindness that happened to Israel, and arrested their spiritual growth, may be happening no less to any of us. As God gave them the spirit of slumber, so it may be with our lives.

And the very thought of our possible risks in this respect is valuable to us.

I. How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dullness of spirit and of general habit?—we have to reply that it is because of the sensitiveness of the human soul to surrounding influences. It is because our souls are so receptive, so imitative, and in consequence so easily perverted, darkened, blinded, or misled. In the light of this feeling of the soul’s sensitiveness the thoughtful man is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of little moment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye of the soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, in consequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spurious consecration, or the world in its blindness may have come to honour them, they are in fact laden with mischief to the general life. It was the thought of this sensitiveness of the soul to external influences, and of the ease with which any bad influence, or bad custom or practice or fashion, perverts common lives, and of the untold mischief which is consequently latent in it, that winged the words of a well-known writer when she protested, some years ago, against what she designated as debasing the moral currency. Whosoever in anything that concerns the conduct of life spreads low notions or drags down men’s opinion or taste, thus helping to pervert ordinary minds from those higher aims and motives and those reverent views of character and life which should be cherished for our common use and service, is debasing the moral currency.

II. Here, then, we have a very practical question for our consideration and answering. ‘Is there anything in my life’—so the question comes to us in our self-examination—‘which could be so described? any influence spreading from my conduct of which men might truly say that it also is helping to debase the moral currency? Is there to be seen in it anything that tends towards the lowering of common standards? any misuse of things sacred or holy? any foolish or vulgar estimate of the higher things of life?’

III. Remembering, then, how sensitive the soul is, and how easily by example, or conduct, or fashion, it may be so perverted as to lose its clear vision and higher aims, its pure tastes and ennobling emotions, we have to make it our ambition and endeavour that our life may be kept free from such debasement. But if we are to succeed in this, we must make it our daily prayer that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ will enlighten the eyes of our understanding, and give unto us the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge and love of Him.

—Bishop Percival.