The Gift of Spiritual Discernment

“Those who have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” — HEs. v. 14.

THERE are grades of spiritual discernment. There are undisciplined senses which can detect only presumptuous sins and have no perception of secret faults. They can apprehend the sin which lodges in some glaring crime, but they cannot appreciate the sin which hides in the spirit of an age. At one of the Royal Society’s meetings Mr. Astor exhibited a micro-balance, all built up of quartz fibres, each as fine as a spider’s web, the purpose of which is to discern and weigh the faintest traces of gas.

And we are purposed by the Lord to have an analogous endowment in the soul. A comparatively coarse conscience can register the sin of drunkenness, but it requires more exquisite feelers to discern a faint but deadly gas, a corrupting spirit, the iniquity which can hide in an atmosphere. And yet it is in these aerial forms that sin is most i 218 The Gift of Spiritual Discernment a a ee

commonly met. Days and weeks pass by and we may never meet it in the shape of some fierce and distinctive passion, but every hour it rides upon the wings of the wind. Only now and again do we meet our enemy as a roaring lion, but we continually meet him as “the prince of the power of the air.” We may escape the lion, we cannot escape the atmosphere. To be able to discern the faintest trace of gas is one of the conditions of spiritual immunity.

Now we are never so much alert to bad air as when we have been breathing good air. If we come out of a crowded room, and fill our lungs with the fresh, clean air, and then return to the room, we are keenly sensitive to the poisoned atmosphere within. We must continually draw in breath in the fear of the Lord, and be filled with the Holy Ghost, if we would be able to discern the deadly gases of insidious worldliness, The soul must be constantly refreshed if she is to retain the freshness of her perceptions, It is only the soul that knows God which has an instant recognition of the ungodly. Atmospheres reveal their secrets, and the noxious breath is dispersed before it has begun its destructive work.