Weariness in Welldoing

In the world of the soul there are sometimes sha dows, when there are no clouds. It continues clear and blue overhead, but the brightness has passed away. We cannot tell how the shadow began, or from what quarter it came. It will go as it came, without apparent cause, perhaps without observation. These inward shadows have mostly their significance. Sometimes they herald the coming of an unusual grace. Some times they warn us of the approach of an unusual trial. Yet this last is only another form of grace, because it is the occasion of many graces. Sometimes they come and go, and we see no results. Nevertheless the soul has suffered, and there are results. But, whether these shadows prophecy graces, or portend trials, they are in themselves times of temptation, and require both skill and care in their management. These temptations are very apt to take the form of weariness, that weariness in welldoing against which the apostle warned the Thessalonians, and which in their case, as it is in ours, was likely to follow upon excitement, although our excitement need not, like theirs, arise from an immoderate interest in unfulfilled prophecy and the thickening signs of the end of the world.

It is of this weariness in the spiritual life that we are now to treat: and let us, first of all, endeavour to put it before ourselves, as we have doubtless experienced it in our own souls. We may describe it as follows. We are not aware of 17 having shifted our position. We do not recall any graver sin than usual, into which.we have fallen. There is no notable change in our external circum stances. Nevertheless an imperceptible languor has been for some time creeping upon us. We see it in the retrospect; but we did not see it at the time. Prayer has become an effort. Its sweetness, even its repose, has gone from it. A general disinclination to good works is added to this general disrelish of spiritual exercises. Our little mortifications lie like dead weights upon us. The most sacred actions seem likely to degenerate into routine. We feel the immense importance of an effort, but have no heart to make one. There have been times when we have thrown off far greater burdens, but this one is too much for us. We still have religious sentiments, but tiiis is pretty nearly all the religion we have, which is sensible. The light appears to go out from the things of faith. They are blotted and confused. Our own conscience eludes us. We have no grasp of it. The power appears to have retreated from the sacraments. We have fallen, we know not how, into a state which has no little affinity to unbelief. It seems to us that we really can go on no longer. Perseverance is hope less. Nothing has come of the past. Less is likely to come of the future. The present is vacuity. We thought we loved God. Poor souls! are we sure we do not love Him still? Alas! we might manage to die now; but dying is not the difficulty, the difficulty is to go on living. What! another twenty years of morning meditations, of morning, noon, and night particular examens, of daily recitations of the divine office, of daily resistance to temptations, of daily de feats by the same petty unworthinesses! Does it not seem impossible? But what if matters should grow worse? What if we should come to disbelieve? What if we should at last commit a mortal sin? Intolerable prospect! Intolerable weariness! Here we are suc cumbing, not to our passions, not to temptations, not to ponderous crosses, but simply to a feeling of being tired! A while ago, and all things were clear. jSTow we are like men trying to read small print by strong moonlight. There is light enough, but not the right kind of light. We cannot be very far off from despair. Yet what a deadly calm there is about us! We are like men in a nightmare, frantic because we cannot throw off a load, which has no real existence; or like men sinking into a lethargy, whose fingers open and let fall that which they are in the act of grasping.

I think we have put matters at the worst now. I hardly think I have overstated the evil. However I have not understated it. Of course it is serious, but it has no right to be disheartening. It may seem superfluous to talk of courage to a man who is already cowed. I ought to reason with you first. But is it not generally the case, that the most consoling thing in spiritual difficulties is to go well into them, and to study them thoroughly? Even without any professed con solations, they always seem much less formidable afterwards. It is just the same in controversy. If you will not let people prose their own length about their difficulties, conviction rarely follows. But, in nine cases out of ten, a man who has talked his fill about his objection, finds that he has already answered it himself; and, with some show of fight for consistency s sake, easily surrenders, and surrenders reasonably. Nevertheless let us take this comfort at startinor. Is o not our state in its results the same with an interior trial, through which Job was made to pass? " Who will grant me," says he in his anguish,¹ " that I might be according to the months past, according to the days in which God kept me? When His lamp shined over my head, and I walked by His light in darkness? As I was in the days of my youth, when God was secretly in my tabernacle? And now my soul fadeth within myself, and the days of affliction possess me." The trial of a faded soul! It is hard to bear. But Job bore it, came safely to his end, and lies now in the bosom of his Heavenly Father. It will be so with us,- Doubt not.

Let us think first, then, of the probable or possible causes of this weariness. Most things are adequately explained by their causes. I am inclined to think this weariness comes more often from not advancing, than from any actual faults. It is said that not to advance is to be going back in the spiritual life. I would venture to doubt the entire accuracy of this statement. When a man is endeavouring to get out of sin, it may be that every step, which is not forward, is a step backward. Also in the spiritual life it may be true that all present delay makes future progress more difficult, and so less probable. But surely there are many persons whose whole life is spent at a stand-still. It is not that they are standing still themselves, but that their efforts just enable them to maintain their ground, and no more. It is like rowing a boat against a stream. There is sufficient effort to counterbalance the force of the stream, but not sufficient to surmount it. The result is, that the boat remains opposite the same place, not in spite of the rowing, but in consequence of the rowing. If the rower ceased, he would be carried down the stream;

if lie exerted himself more, he would make way up it. It may be said that the continuance of the effort is a great thing, and is substantially progress. It is a great thing certainly. It is forming habits. It is augment ing merits. It is keeping in a safe position. But it can hardly be called progress, at least in the ordinary sanse of the word progress. Lancicius says that not to increase our kinds of venial sin is progress. It is progress in the sense of keeping on the road to heaven, but assuredly it is not progress in the ordinary acceptation of the word. It is not even full correspondence to grace; for the impulses of grace are always onward, always forgetting what has been attained, always leaving that which is behind, as the apostle tells us. Now monotony is disheartening; and when we are out of heart, we are at once weary, however little we have laboured. If we go on rowing, and we have not passed that tree on the bank all the while, we are discontented with ourselves; and to be discontented with ourselves is also instantaneous weariness* The sense of abundant grace falling upon us, and no results following, or very inadequate results, is sure to fatigue us in the long run, and to bring on peevishness, and then vexation, and then discouragement. Moreover, there are few of us who can do without success. The fountains of self-love are not self-supplying. Natural activity cannot fast; it is much if we can get it to abstain. Whatever amount of effort may go to maintain us in the same spot, it is not success. "We get disgusted; and disgust implies weariness. Thus it is that the mere fact of not advancing does in most cases account for that feeling of being tired, which unnerves us, and is a real hindrance to us in the pursuit of holiness.

We must not, however, forget that many of the phenomena of the spiritual life spring from physical causes. Our body can go wrong short of illness, -short of ailment. It is a very delicate and capricious instrument. The reaction after hard work, different seasons of the year, individual constitution, very slight atmospherical dis turbances, all of them tend to bring forth many moral results, without the intervention of actual pain or positive malady. This is a very difficult subject to handle. It is full of dangers. We are all of us too much in clined to make concessions to our bodies. Eeliance on comforts is quite incompatible with true liberty of spirit. The worship of health is one of the most efficient and extensive causes of lukewarmness and indevotion. At the same time the fact is true, that our soul is very much dependent on our body. If we begin attributing to supernatural causes, whether to the operations of grace or to the wiles of Satan, what is really a matter of nerves or of digestion, we are soon in the land of mischievous delusions. We become discouraged when we have no need to be so, and elated when we have no right to be so. We believe our inner self to be the theatre of much that is not going on there at all, and our self-knowledge becomes clouded by exaggeration.

But the important thing to be considered is, that our physical difficulties have to be sanctified just as much as our spiritual difficulties. Bodily disturbance is no dispensation from duty, until it begins to be something like an incapability, or at least until the attempt to discharge the duty would be an imprudence. This is the common mistake. Granted, that our evil temper comes just now from nerves or indigestion: but not granted, that it is on that account to be any the less combated. The monstrous assumption, which we most of us make, is that this corporal annoyance, which accounts for our irritability or any other sin, also excuses it. For this there is not a shadow of proof. To account for a thing, and to excuse a thing, are two vastly different processes. Charity may use such an assumption in our judgments of others, in order to justify the ingenuity of its benignant constructions. But we cannot use it as a plea for self- acquittal, and rarely even as an argument for diminution of self-punishment. If we once so much as begin to do this, we have not merely taken a step off the right road, but we have fallen over a precipice. The same reasoning obviously applies to mental unwellness, to sorrow, vexation, misfortune, uncertainty, the sense of injustice, wounded feelings, or the chafing of responsi bilities. These harassments are the sources of many things which go wrong in the spiritual life. But while they account for them, they do not excuse them. For these bodily and mental necessities and infirmities are just what we have to defend ourselves against, and bring into subjection to grace. At the same time, we shall be more simple, childlike, genuine, and straightforward, when we attribute the discomforting phenomena, with out surprise, to these natural causes, than when we fancy all manner of supernatural possibilities which have no real existence in our case, and the thought of which is in itself enough to do us harm, because it engenders in us a kind of confused and underground feeling that we are suffering, or being put through, something in common with the saints. Xow it is plain that weariness is just the kind of misery, which bodily disturbance or mental anxiety would be likely to produce. For both body and mind chafe the soul, and chafing makes it fretful, and fretmlness is near of kin to weariness.

At the same time I am far from denying the almost incessant action of the Evil One upon our souls in the spiritual life, or from confining it to the higher and more unusual conditions of those aiming at perfection. It is not the saints only who fight with devils. "We all do so. Or if we do not do so, it is because we already belong to Satan, and are his property. There is no doubt that our weariness is very often from this preternatural source; and it must be acknowledged that the thought is a very discouraging one. Yet it is foolish to expect that there should be no discouragement in the lifelong effort to win heaven. There are worse things in spirituality than discouragement, bad as it is. Bat perfect humility alone is exempt from it. We must be content therefore to feel that the Evil One has great power over us, even against our own will, but that he cannot force us to sin. He can only make us suffer. G-od is our Father; and so He that is for us is greater than all those who are against us. There are perhaps no infallible signs by which we can tell when our languor comes from this preternatural source. But we may generally suppose that such is its origin, when we feel it in spiritual things, and not in other things, when it comes on us instantaneously, when it affects the exer cises of the interior life more than the discharge of external duties, and when it keeps palpably increasing without any visible cause to which we can refer it. Still, even when we suppose our weariness thus to come upon us, we are neither to struggle less determinedly against it, nor to imagine that we ourselves are to be forthwith acquitted of all blame in the matter.

Not unfrequently this weariness is a punishment for past sin. When the Holy Ghost is grieved, the soul is weary. An intermittent piety is especially punished in this way. If we are easy in allowing outward interruptions to break in upon our usual devotions, if for slight ailments we suspend our ordinary prayers, if we permit anxieties and occupations to make us omit our frequentation of the sacraments, and, above all, if we are not punctual and systematic in our examinations of conscience, the feeling of weariness comes upon us as we return to them. In the ordinary course of things perseverance implies freshness. Yesterday is an impulse to today, and today -will be an impulse to tomorrow. Being pious by jerks is common enough; but it is sure to be a failure. Excitements may awaken us out of sin, but they cannot constitute real progress.

But of all the faults, which are punished by this weariness, the most common, and the one which has most affinity to its punishment, is the want of recollection. Dissipated thoughts, exuberant, unweighed words, an impatience under solitude, distracted prayers, objectless frittering away of time, passive half-unconscious dream ing, all this is want of recollection. It loosens our hold upon God. It blunts our sense of His presence. It unmans the soul, and relaxes all its powers, as if we had swallowed some deleterious drug. Even in our solitude we may be unrecollected; for silence does not of itself ensure recollection. We may have dissipating pursuits. We may read too much, or too variously. We may forget Thomas a Kempis advice, that we had better be content to be ignorant of many things. We may spread our attention over too wide a surface. We may load our minds with too great an abundance of images. We may even insensibly let the thought of God do duty for direct prayer to God. Certainly, when a man is alone, he has to hold his tongue; and the mere holding of our tongues is the cessation of two-thirds of the venial sins of our lives. Nevertheless contemplative vocations are rare, and when a man has not such a vocation, solitude, which is anything more than occasional, dissipates him more than work will do. It is easy to unspiritualize our solitude. We know that we have done so, when we become unbusiness like in our devotions. An intolerable fit of weariness is at hand. We must be almost as quick as lightning, like sailors in a squall, if we would get ready to meet it safely, or rather to bear it safely, for it comes upon us mostly from behind. If it is occasionally a prophecy of the future, it is most often a child of the past.

Self-will also has a peculiar power to bring on this weariness. I do not mean self-will in religious things only, but a course of self-will even in things indifferent. There is something especially corrupting in the following of our own wills, however trifling the things in which we follow them may be. This is why St. Paul tells us to do everything for the glory of God. This is why kindness is such a help to piety, because it gives us an external motive in almost all the social or domestic occurrences of the clay. To have no master is to be a slave. The despotism of liberty is the most de grading of all despotisms. It vilifies all that is noble and generous in our nature. It is incompatible with magnificence of action. The grandiloquence of self-praise is the highest eminence it can reach. Moreover of all despots, self-will is the most baseborn, and has also the fewest acquired capabilities of governing. It is this which makes superiorship so seldom sanctifying, and superiors so hardly saved. O how littleminded any superiority makes us! If it made us narrow-hearted as well, we should be hopeless. If then you let self-will ride you even in things indifferent, it will gallop you to death, and you will be good for nothing for weeks afterwards.

Then, again, there is a weariness which is the mere weariness of perseverance. There is something in per severance which is uncongenial to the caprice and instability of our nature. To judge from what we see, perseverance even in the uniformity of sin is difficult, notwithstanding that our corrupt propensities incline us in the same direction. Still more then is this the case with perseverance in a line of conduct, which is always more or less of a constraint, because it is an incessant warfare. There is a monotony in welldoing, and it is not a monotony of success. The same resolutions, the same efforts, the same partial failure, the same round of humbling experience, which has become as familiar to us and as uninteresting as counting a hundred, these things, when they go on for years, and are stripped of all excitement, which is as oil to the wheels of our natural activity, begin to bear very hard upon us. Instead of growing easier, as a habit in natural things does, piety grows harder. It seems as if the burden increased with the numerical sum of years. Sometimes circumstances combine to render it almost intolerable. We are like men hanging over a cliff. Our whole weight hangs upon our fingers, and they are grasping a rock which their own moisture renders every moment more slippery. We feel that, if some unexpected succour does not come, our destruction is but an affair of minutes. The tide of grace is not uniform. It has its neaps as well as its springs. We have for the most part no idea how large a proportion of our continuance in devotion is due to grace, and not to our own efforts. If the tide of grace ebbs unusually low for a time, it is quite a terror to us to see how little

2G8 WEARINESS IN WELLDOING.

we have to do with our own goodness, how little absolutely, and how much less than we heretofore conceived was possible. It is a wholesome terror. The feeling of utter dependence upon grace is half perseverance. Our confidence in God is always in proportion to our want of confidence in ourselves. Our helplessness is the hopeful feature of our grace. Nevertheless these ebbs of grace, these appearances of our perseverance being worn through and threadbare, are trying mo ments. In mercy they generally last but a little while. But when they come in middle life, when the fervour of our beginnings is past, and spiritual habits are not yet mature, they are especially hard to bear, and we seldom pass through them without a loss.

Then, last of all, there is no doubt a weariness which is altogether supernatural, wholly an operation of grace, or at the least a divine permission. God sends it to us, not so much as a punishment for sin, as one of the pro cesses by which our soul is to be cleansed, and fitted for higher things. It is also true that these divine visitations are not confined to contemplative souls, or only accompany the more delicate and less common operations of grace. They are perhaps more common than we suppose. Nevertheless they are rare. All I need observe about them here is, that there is no necessity we should know when our weariness is directly from God. Indeed it is. generally an essential part of the trial that we should not know it. It is not necessary to know it, because the knowledge would not alter our manner of dealing with it. It would only be a comfort. It would not be required in order to moderate our discouragement. For, if the trial came to us as an operation of grace, it would probably bring with it a degree of humility which would counterbalance the discouragement.

These are the sources from which this feeling of weariness may proceed. Let us next look at the mischief which it does.

It makes us leave off good works, or suspend spiritual exercises. It breeds in us a spurious kind of prudence. Because we feel a burden, we argue that we have taken too much upon ourselves. We have committed ourselves to God indiscreetly. We must draw back while we can. We must abridge our hours of prayer. We must strike off some of our little mortifications, be cause, though very little, they are exceedingly tiresome. We reason like men who think they need not keep Lent, because fasting weakens them, and more or less tells upon their health, which of course it was meant to do within certain bounds. It is in our seasons of weariness that we come down the mountain a little, and put ourselves on a slightly lower level, and applaud our timely discretion. Alas! many slight descents come to make a considerable descent in time, and we, who began with determining to be saints, where are we now?

When weariness does not cause us to leave things off, it leads us to do them badly and perfunctorily. We think our fatigue an adequate dispensation from vigilance and recollection, as a man who is preaching a Lent does not trouble himself so much as usual about distractions in saying Office. Now what if it should be true in the spiritual life, that the not doing of a thing at all, provided it is not of obligation, is a less evil than the doing of it badly? I should not wonder if it were so. Indeed I am inclined to suspect it is. At any rate the ill doing of a good thing is a very great evil. For it not only renders unmeritorious those works by which we might greatly merit, but it makes them also perfect nests of venial sins. Moreover such fraudulent doin or of

God s work has a special curse attached to it in Scripture, and is full of grave consequences to the soul.

Furthermore, weariness makes us impatient of God s company. Holiness is the companionship of God. It requires a renovation of the heart by grace, the infusion of heavenly instincts, a complete revolutionizing of our natural tastes, an unearthly appreciation of things, before we can taste this company of God, and find it sweet. There must be a great change in us before He can be our resting-place. We need conversion. We require strengthening with that " perfect" or " principal" spirit, of which David speaks in the fiftieth psalm. Xow it is our spiritual tastes, which are the first things for weariness to vitiate. God becomes dull to us. He is uninteresting. He is undemonstrative. He cannot t_7 be in the wrong, because He is God. But He is not positively attractive. How ever was it, that we took such delight in prayer? That overpowering sweetness, was it not simply a physical affair? That little dawn of love of suffering which began to lighten in our hearts, was it not some foolish delusion? That delicious feeling of sinking lower and lower in the sense of our own unworthiness, was it not all a mistake, or perhaps a dream? We not only cannot feel as we felt before, but we cannot believe that we ever felt so before. Con verts sometimes do a blameless wrono- to those who are o still unconverted, because they cannot even in thought make themselves masters of their old position. So we cannot understand now the relation in which we once stood to God. On the contrary, though we dare not put it into words so plainly, His vicinity has become an annoyance to us. His very condescension frets us. We would be peevish in our prayers, if we dared. We almost repent we ever went so far with Him. Is not this a misery? To be weary of God, to turn away with impatience from our eternal home, to have taken the bloom off this world and to be sick of the other! We tire of Him, never to be tired of whom is in itself our everlasting bliss! Oh, if we die in the attempt, we must push on. We cannot be quiet for an hour under the pressure of such unblessed fatigue as this.

But this leads further. It leads into that endless, hopeless business of seeking consolations and recreations outside of God, and shortly afterwards, far away from God. I sometimes think that to be near God but out side of Him is to be at a greater distance, than when we are far away from Him, as we speak in the spiritual life. To wish to be comforted by any one but Him is always a sad misfortune, and very often a positive sin. But to turn away from Him, and seek in creatures what we profess not to have found adequately in Him, this is surely of all miseries the nearest to a state of sin. As I said, it is an endless and a hopeless business. There is no end to it, because it is a search which can never find, a chase which never can come up with its prey, a journey which has no termination. Like bees among distasteful flowers, we fly from one to another, hardly lighting, merely tasting; but the honey which we taste is drugged. It stimulates, or intoxicates, or makes us drowsy. Thus our taste becomes more and more vitiated. We are just as far as ever from finding what we sought, but we are immeasurably farther from what we have left. Strange to say! creature -consolation becomes more of a necessity to us, the less we are satisfied by it. The more completely we despair of finding it, the more obstinately do we persist in seeking it. It is a kind of spiritual debauchery, which at last will leave the soul a perfect wreck, with all its powers of self-recovery gone, and with no possible hope except in a miracle of grace, the only likelihood of which is in that peculiar love of God, which seems to- be only the more patiently excited by the special unlovingness of our desertion of Him. When we see a soul in such a state as this, we involuntarily hold our breath, as when we see a man upon the verge of some perilous height. What then should we think and feel, if our own sou-l is consciously travelling that way?

This vain research of creature-consolation, like all failures, and more than most failures, makes us peevish with others. We wreak our disappointment upon them, as if they were to blame because they were creatures, and could not do what God has reserved to Himself alone the risiit of beingj able to do. Peevishness, as usual, brings with it the feeling of a bad conscience; and anything like true prayer becomes almost impossible. In this state of perpetual irritation we soon become disgusted with ourselves, and this disgust is so o O little like a humble hatred of ourselves that it is incompatible with it. It is the very antipodes of humility. It borders closely upon despair, which, rightly considered, is nothing more than the extinguishing of humility. But we cannot live in such a state as this. It would be too unbearable. We must restore peace of some kind to our soul. We must sweeten our disposi tions by some means or other. This leads us yet a step lower. We give in to natural repose. We seek compensation in bodily comforts, for what we suffer in spiritual tilings. Self-indulgence gives us a kind of amiability: spurious indeed, and perhaps only temporary. Yet it serves for the moment, and we are content. This is the end of our feeling of weariness. It has not so much torn open our spiritual life, as unstitched it. But it has done this completely. The old original leaving of our bodily comforts was our first step towards union with God, and here we are arrived at them again. Who then will dare to leave unwatched, or passively to bear, this insidious feeling of being tired, which comes to such an evil end at last?

But, before we conclude, we ought to say something on the treatment of this weariness. This will not take us long, because so much has been implied already. We must remember, first of all, that our struggle against it must be equal, whatever the source of the weariness may be; because the danger is equal, what ever may be the excuse. We must not fret and toss tinder it, like a sick man who cannot sleep; but still we must not be passive. In the next place, we must watch with an exceeding jealousy, against all worshipping of health. The encroachments of this idolatry are very insidious. No other angel of darkness simulates an ansfel of light so well. None can argue so well, or talk

O o o f so reasonably, or so successfully feign the excellences of moderation and discretion. Nevertheless all spiritual writers agree, that it is one of the most common, as well as most fatal, enemies of devotion. When it has established itself, weariness is its firstborn. Health has of course to be considered, because it not only involves our external work, which represents our duties to others, but it also rules our interior life, which is our intercourse with God. On the whole, in cases of doubt, it is safer to decide against health than for it. But the safest thing of all is to follow the dispassionate judgment of others, provided that on the one hand our questions are put fairly, and are not mere fishings for particular answers, and on the other that we have not chosen a guide, who through goodnature or indifference will always ratify the demands of our own softness. Yet this is hard to do; for, after all, the sick man is the only man in most cases who understands what he suffers, better than either priest or physician. Yet we know that if he made this his rule of action with his body, he would soon be dead; and the case is the same with the treatment of his soul.

It is a custom, which many have practised with advantage when this weariness has been upon them, to bind themselves by vows for extremely short periods; vows to get up at a certain hour in the morning, or to examine their conscience for a given time before going to bed, or to persevere in that thing, whatever it may be, which the feeling of weariness makes us imagine just then to be impossible. But this also is a rule, which can only be followed under advice. We must also regulate our actions very carefully. Punctuality, always a thing of huge importance in the pursuit of perfection, is now indispensable. It has become a matter of life and death. We must be quiet and not precipitate, steady and not intermittent. We must deal firmly with ourselves, but it must be a very gentle firmness. We must consider our weariness either as a punishment to be endured reverently, or as a suffering to be borne in union with the Passion of our Blessed Lord. Above all, we must fix our energies courageously on it, and not allow ourselves to underrate its importance. What we have already said will surely persuade us to this most cogently. For we have seen that it first of all undoes old and long habits of good, secondly that it leads to a nausea of spiritual things, and thirdly that it pushes us

WEARINESS IN WELLDOING. Z<D to the distinct abandonment of the higher level we took o at first, and to the taking of a lower one, which will most probably have also to be abandoned in its turn.

But it is a great trial, and I wish I could console you more efficaciously under it. It is a very real suffering. Nevertheless we must either push on, or give up the strife. As to this last, I do not say, Who will dare to do it, but rather, Whose love of God will let him do it? It is cruel to drag a man up and down a room after he has been overdosed with laudanum, while he is moaning with weariness, and entreating to be allowed to lie down and sleep. Yet it is one of those cruelties, which are part of the imperiousness of mercy. So we must let ourselves be shaken, and forced onwards, and pricked with needles, if need be, and beaten as though we were flagging beasts of burden. I take it for granted, that we are clear about our not doing as much for God as we very well might do. Let us hold on, tired as we are. We shall be less tired, when we come to our second wind, if we may be allowed so to name that second fervour, which is so often granted to the lukewarm, and which spiritual writers too much ignore. Life is short. The thing is to be ready to die, and to be free from reproach at that dread hour: and is there one of us who would quite like to die, doing as little for God as we are doing now?

Footnotes

1. cap. xxix. xxx. ↩