the love of our Father, our Saviour, our Sanctifier.  Sorrow springing from love is sorrow “after a godly sort.”  It is easy for us to drift into ways of carelessness and indifference which seem not to involve sin, to be no more than a decline from some preceding standard of practice which we conclude to have been unnecessarily strict; but the result is an increasing disregard of spiritual values, a growing obscuration of the divine presence in life.  Then the day comes when some quite marked and positive spiritual failure, a failure of which we cannot imagine ourselves to have been guilty, when we were living in constant communion with our Lord, arouses us to the fact that for months our spiritual vitality has been declining and that we have ended in losing Jesus.  It is a tremendous shock to find how fast and how far we have been travelling when we thought that we were only slightly relaxing an unnecessarily strict routine:  that when we thought that we were but acting “in a common sense way,” we were in reality effecting a compromise with the world.  Well is it then if the surprise of our disaster shocks us back to the recovery of what we have lost, if it send us into the streets of the city, sorrowing and seeking for Jesus.

Mere spiritual laziness is at the bottom of much failure in religion.  There is no success anywhere in life save through the constant pressure of the will driving a reluctant and protesting set of nerves and muscles to their daily tasks.  The day labourer comes home from his work with his muscular strength exhausted, but he has to go back to the same monotonous task on the morrow:  his family has to be fed and clothed and he cannot permit himself to say, “I am tired and will stay away from work to-day.”  The business or professional man comes back from his office with a wearied brain that makes any thought an effort, but he must take up the routine to-morrow; the pressure of competitive business does not permit him to work when and as much as he chooses.  But the Christian who is engaged in the most important work that is carried on in this world, the work of preparing an immortal soul for an unending future, is constantly under the temptation “to take a day off”—­to let down the standard of accomplishment till it ceases to interfere with the business or the pleasure of life; is constantly too tired or too busy to do this or that.  In short, religion is apt to be treated in a manner that would ensure the bankruptcy of any material occupation in life.  Why then should it not ensure spiritual bankruptcy?

Surely, to retain Jesus with us, to live in the intimacy of God, is the most pressingly important of our duties; it is worth any sort of expenditure of energy to accomplish it.  And it cannot be accomplished without expenditure of energy.  The view of religion which conceives it as a facile assent to certain propositions, the occasional and formal participation in certain actions, the more or less strict observance of certain rules