all ye that fear God, and I will tell you what He hath done for my soul.  Yes, come on, and from this day all your days on earth, and all the days of eternity, you will thank God for John Bunyan and his Holy War and his Ill-pause.  Make your selection, then, for your new axe.  Attack some one sin at this so auspicious season.  Swear before God, and unknown to all men—­swear sure death, and that without any more delay, to that selected sin.  Never once, all your days, do that sin again.  Determine never once to do it again.  Determine that by prayer, by secret, and at the same time outspoken, prayer on your knees.  Determine it by faith in the cleansing blood and renewing spirit of Jesus Christ.  Determine it by fear of instant death, and by sure hope of everlasting life.  Determine it by reasons, and motives, and arguments, and encouragements known to no-one but yourself, and to be suspected by no human being.  Name the doomed sin.  Denounce it.  Execrate it.  Execute it.  Draw a line across your short and uncertain life, and say to that besetting and presumptuous sin, Hitherto, and no further!  Do not say you cannot do it.  You can if you only will.  You can if you only choose.  And smiting down that one sin will loosen and shake down the whole evil fabric of sin.  Breaking but that one link will break the whole of Satan’s snare and evil fetter.  Here is A Kempis’s forest of vices out of which he hewed down one every year.  Restless lust, outward senses, empty phantoms, always longing to get, always sparing to give, careless as to talk, unwilling to sit silent, eager for food, wakeful for news, weary of a good book, quick to anger, easy of offence at my neighbour, and too ready to judge him, too merry over prosperity, and too gloomy, fretful, and peevish in adversity; so often making good rules for my future life, and coming so little speed with them all, and so on.  And, in facing even such a terrible thicket as that, let not even an old man absolutely despair.  At forty, at sixty, at threescore and ten, let not an old penitent despair.  Only take axe in hand and see if the sun does not stand still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon till you have avenged yourself on your enemies.  And always when you stop to wipe your brow, and to whet the edge of your axe, and to wet your lips with water, keep on saying things like those of another great sinner deep in his thicket of vice, say this:  O God, he said, Thou hast not cut off as a weaver my life, nor from day even to night hast Thou made an end of me.  But Thou hast vouchsafed to me life and breath even to this hour from childhood, youth, and hitherto even unto old age.  He holdeth our soul in life, and suffereth not our feet to slide, rescuing me from perils, sicknesses, poverty, bondage, public shame, evil chances; keeping me from perishing in my sins, and waiting patiently for my full conversion.  Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee, for Thine