eason, 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."

Sometimes we are too tired to keep Sunday properly, and we give to
"private sloth the time which was meant for public worship;" but surely
then the Sabbath breaking lay really in the week's excess of work. If we
allow ourselves to live so hard in the week, to be so late on Saturday,
that we are sleepy and stupid on Sunday morning, then we are not keeping
the Fourth Commandment, even if we force ourselves to go to Church; we are
not serving God with a fair share of our mind and strength.

In these over-worked days of nerve exhaustion, it should be an inducement
to remember how fresh and unwearied Mr. Gladstone was kept by his regular
Sunday habits. He said, "Sunday I reserve for religious employments, and
this has kept me alive and well, even to a marvel, in time of considerable
labour. We are born on each Lord's day morning into a new climate, where
the lungs and heart of the Christian life should drink in continuously the
vital air."

Retreats and Rest-cures are nowadays found to be imperatively necessary;
but are not both symptoms