imagination to dramatize the seriousness of an event. After guiding his readers
through a meditation on the horrors of hell he declares, “I have lead you through the
dungeon, let this sight serve for a terrour that you never come nearer.”^112 Additionally
he recognized that the “imagination [can] work a real change in nature.”^113 At times
he combines the power of imagination with looking at Christ and declares, “[a]nd no
question but there is a kinde of spiritual imaginative of power in faith to be like to
Christ by looking on Christ.”^114
Puritan teaching is in agreement that the Fall severely damaged the
imagination, making it unreliable. Ambrose warns his readers of the Devil’s ability
and desire to work in a person’s imagination.^115 Sibbes expands this reality,
declaring, “[a]nd amongst all the faculties of the soul, most of the disquiet and
unnecessary trouble of our lives arises from the vanity and ill government of that
power of the soul which we call imagination.... This imagination of ours is become
the seat of vanity, and thereupon of vexation to us, because it apprehends a greater
happiness in outward good things than there is.”^116 He continues by summarizing four
major dangers of misguided imagination: making false representations, blocking
reason and wise judgments, creating impressions that lack reality, and a tendency to
create vanity and mischief.^117 However, Sibbes was also fully aware of the potential
benefit of harnessing the imagination for good. He asserted, “[a]s the soul receives
much hurt from imagination, so it may have much good thereby... A sanctified fancy
(^112) Ambrose, Ultima (^) in Prima, Media, Ultima (^) (1654), 137.
(^113) Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus, 526.
(^114) Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus, 668.
(^115) Ambrose, War with Devils, 109, 116.
(^116117) Sibbes, Soul’s Conflict, 178-9.
Sibbes, Soul’s Conflict, 180.