to their throat, that same knife must be made to draw blood in all parts of their mind and their heart, in their will and in their imagination, till a perfect chorus of self-denials rings like noblest martial music through all the gates, and streets, and fortresses, and strongholds, and very palaces and temples of the soul.  I shall here stand aside and let the greatest of the English mystics speak to you on this present point.  ‘When we speak of self-denial,’ he says, in his Christian Perfection, ’we are apt to confine it to eating and drinking:  but we ought to consider that, though a strict temperance be necessary in these things, yet that these are the easiest and the smallest instances of self-denial.  Pride, vanity, self-love, covetousness, envy, and other inclinations of the like nature call for a more constant and a more watchful self-denial than the appetites of hunger and thirst.  And till we enter into this course of universal self-denial we shall make no progress in real piety, but our lives will be a ridiculous mixture of I know not what; sober and covetous, proud and devout, temperate and vain, regular in our forms of devotion and irregular in all our passions, circumspect in little modes of behaviour and careless and negligent of tempers the most essential to piety.  And thus it will necessarily be with us till we lay the axe to the root of the tree, till we deny and renounce the whole corruption of our nature, and resign ourselves up entirely to the Spirit of God, to think and speak and act by the wisdom and the purity of religion.’

5.  Stout as Captain Self-denial was, and notable alarms and some brisk execution as he did upon the enemy, yet he must meet with some brushes himself; indeed, he carried several of the marks of such brushes on his face as well as on some other parts of his body.  If I had read in his history that Young Captain Self-denial had left his mark upon his enemies, I would have said, Well done, and I would have added that I always expected as much.  But it is far more to my purpose to read that he had not always got himself off without wounds that left lasting scars both where they were seen of all, and where they were seen and felt only by Self-denial himself.  And not Self-denial only, but even Paul, in our flesh, and with like passions with us, had the same experience and has left us the same record.  ‘I keep my body under’:  so our emasculated English version makes us read it.  But the visual image in the masterly original Greek is not so mealy-mouthed.  I box and buffet myself day and night, says Paul.  I play the truculent tyrant over a lewd and lazy slave.  I hit myself blinding blows on my tenderest part.  I am ashamed to look at myself in the glass, for all under my eyes I am black and blue.  If David, after the matter of Uriah, had done that to himself, and even more than that, we would not have wondered; we would have expected it, and we would have said, It is no more than we would have done ourselves.