Romans 1:19-21 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has showed it to them.… What you love, what you desire, what you think about, you are photographing, printing on the walls of your immortal nature. And just as today, thousands of years after the artists have been gathered to the dust, we. may go into Egyptian temples and see the figures on their walls in all the freshness of their first colouring, as if the painter had but laid down his pencil a moment ago; so on your hearts youthful evils, the sins of your boyhood, the pruriences of your earliest days, may leave ugly shapes that no tears and no repentance will ever wipe out. Nothing can do away with "the marks of that which once hath been." What are you painting on the chambers of imagery in your hearts? Obscenity, foul things, mean things, low things? Is that mystic shrine within you painted with such figures as in some chambers in Pompeii, where the excavators had to cover up the pictures because they were so foul; or is it like the cells in the Convent of San Marco at Florence, where Fra Angelico's holy and sweet genius painted on the bare walls, to be looked at, as he fancied, only by one devout brother in each cell, angel imaginings, and noble, pure celestial faces that calm and hallow those who gaze upon them? What are you doing, my brother, in the dark, in the chambers of your imagery? (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.WEB: because that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it to them. |
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