You may say, “What good will my abstinence do to people with whom I never come in contact?” Tell me what influence really is; how it spreads, by what unseen modes it ramifies and extends.

Tell me the real significance, the true spiritual value, of the fact that “if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it:  if one member rejoice, all the members rejoice with it.”

Then perhaps you can explain in some way, how your abstinence shall spread to desolated homes, to stricken lives, in crowded slums or quiet villages, in fire-raked trenches or storm-tossed ships.

No act of self-sacrifice for His sake, Who though He was rich yet for our sakes became poor, ever went without its rich reward.

No tiny wave of influence ever yet sped forth from a Christian heart, but what reached its mark and wrought its work of beneficent power.

For suggested meditations during the week, see Appendix.

III

=The Discipline of the Soul=

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT

St. John vi. 38

  “For I am come down from Heaven, not to do Mine own will, but
  the will of Him that sent Me.”

To-day we are going to speak of the soul not in its popular sense, as set over against the body, but in the scriptural meaning of the word as the broad equivalent of life.

To enter upon a philosophical discussion might prove interesting from a merely academic point of view, but would be eminently unpractical.  Suffice it to say that when S. Paul speaks of the “body, soul and spirit” (1 Thess. v. 23), he takes the two latter as different faculties of the invisible part of man.

Soul ([Greek:  psyche]) is the lower attribute which man has in common with the animals; spirit ([Greek:  pneuma]) the higher one which they do not possess, and which makes man capable of religion.

In this sense, then, the soul would mean the life the man or woman is leading, in the home, the business, the pleasures, the relaxations, as distinct from the definite exercise of devotion or worship.

Of course it is absolutely impossible to draw a hard and fast line between sacred and secular.  All secular affairs, rightly conducted, have their sacred side; and conversely all sacred matters have their secular side, for they form part of the life the man is living “in the age.”

It is the neglect of this truth which is responsible for much of the moral and religious failure of the day.

Business is secular, prayer is sacred, and so they have no practical connection each with other.

Amusement is secular (often vastly too much so, in the very lowest sense of the word); Holy Communion is sacred; therefore there is no link between them.  Whereas the prayer and the Communion should be the ennobling and sanctifying power alike of work and play.