I hope Sunday-like Sundays are not only to be found in old houses, but we all feel that Sunday quiet is likely to be the first thing sacrificed in the rush and bustle of modern life.  But if we have no time to eat, we cannot keep up to working pitch, we lose vitality:  if we have no time for spiritual food, our souls lose vitality, and unfortunately starvation of the soul is a painless process, so we may unconsciously be getting weaker and weaker spiritually.

You are regularly on your knees night and morning, but are you ever two minutes alone with God?—­and yet “being silent to God”—­alone with Him—­is, humanly speaking, the only condition on which He can “mould us."[5] I am so afraid that the lawful pleasures and even the commanded duties of life, let alone its excitements and cravings, will eat out your possibilities of spirituality and saintliness:  it is so easy to float on the stream of life with others—­so terribly hard to come, you yourself, alone into a desert place to listen to those words out of the mouth of God, by which only your individual life can be fed.  The self-denials of Lent are comparatively easy, but to gain that quietness, which Bishop Gore says is “the essence of Lent,” is a hard struggle at all times of the year.  Do not let any one think, “this is all very well for quiet homes, but I cannot be expected to act on it, since ‘the week-end’ is always so busy.”  It would be very unpractical to say, day after day, “I cannot be expected, for this and that excellent reason, to eat my dinner to-day.”  You would soon find it advisable, for your own sake, to find some time at which you could eat.  I do not say, though it would be true, “it is a sin to break the Sabbath, and, in order to avoid God’s anger, you must go to Church and read good books;”—­I say, “for your own sake, you cannot afford to neglect these things, and if you cannot find time on Sunday, it will be not only a crime but a blunder if you do not make time on Saturday or Monday.”  I only say, “if you do not eat enough to keep you alive, you will die; and if you do not feed on the Word of God, your soul will shrivel away.”

Dante saw some souls in hell whose bodies were still alive on earth,—­their friends in Florence and Lucca had not the faintest idea that these men, seemingly a part of everyday life, were, all the time, “dead souls.”  There is hardly a more terrible idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own daily life—­this atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself as due to his own neglect.  Mr. Clifford, in “A Likely Story,” forcibly depicts a soul awaking in the next world to find that through this unconscious starvation, there was no longer anything in him to correspond with God.  “The possibility of death is involved in our Lord’s words about the power of living by the Word of God.”