S. Mary and S. Joseph were proceeding on certain assumptions as to what Jesus would do which turned out to be untenable.  It is one of the dangers of our religion—­our personal religion—­that we are apt to assume too much which in the testing turns out to be unfounded.  We reach a certain stage of religious attainment, and then we assume that all is going well with us.  When one asks a child how he is getting on he invariably answers:  “I am all right.”  And the adult often has the same childish confidence in an untested and unverified state of soul.  We are “all right”; which practically means that we do not care to be bothered with looking into our spiritual state at all.  We have been going on for years now following the rules that we laid down when we first realised that the being a Christian was a more or less serious matter.  Nothing has happened in these years to break the placidity of our routine.  There has never been any relapse into grievous sin; we have never felt any real temptation to abandon the practice oL our religion.  We run along as easily and smoothly as a car on well-laid rails.  We are “all right.”

But in fact we are all wrong.  We have lapsed into a state of which the ideal is purely static:  an ideal of spiritual comfort as the goal of our spiritual experience here on earth.  We have acquired what appears to be a state of equilibrium into which we wish nothing to intrude that would endanger the balance.  We are, no doubt, quite unconsciously, excluding from life every emotion, every ambition, as well as every temptation, which appears to involve spiritual disturbance.  But we need to be disturbed.

For the spiritual life is dynamic and not static; its ideal is motion and not rest.  Rest is the quality of dead things, and particularly of dead souls.  The weariness of the way, which is so obvious a phenomenon in the Christian life, is the infallible sign of lukewarmness.  What we need therefore is to break with the assumption that we know all that it is necessary to know, and that we have done or are doing all that it is necessary to do.  It is indeed the mark of an ineffective religion that the notion of necessity is adopted as its stimulus, rather than the notion of aspiration.  The question, “Must I do this?” is a revelation of spiritual poverty and ineptitude.  “I press on,” is the motto of a living religion.

Personal religion, therefore, needs constantly to be submitted to new tests, lest it lapse into an attitude of finality.  Fortunately for us, God does not leave the matter wholly in our hands, but Himself, through His Providence, applies a wide variety of tests to us.  It is often a bitter and disturbing experience to have our comfortable routine broken up and to find that we have quite miserably failed under very simple temptations.  And the sort of failure I am thinking of is not so much the failure of sin as the failure of ideal.  It is the case of those who think that they have satisfactorily worked