ace are
you posted by your Lord to keep for yourself and for Him? And with what
cost of meat and drink and sleep and amusement do you lose it or keep it
for Him? Alexander used to leave his tent at midnight and go round the
camp, and spear to his post the sentinel he found sleeping.

There is nothing we are all so slothful in as secret, particular,
importunate prayer. We have an almighty instrument in our hand in secret
and exact prayer if we would only importunately and perseveringly employ
it. But there is an utterly unaccountable restraint of secret and
particularising prayer in all of us. There is a soaking, stupefying
sloth, that so fills our hearts that we forget and neglect the immense
concession and privilege we have afforded us in secret prayer. Our sloth
and stupidity in prayer is surely the last proof of our fall and of the
misery of our fallen state. Our sloth with a gold mine open at our feet;
a little more sleep on the top of a mast with a gulf under us that hath
no bottom,--no language of this life can adequately describe the
besottedness of that man who lies with irons on his heels between Simple
and Presumption.

PRESUMPTION

The greatest theologian of the Roman Catholic Church has made an
induction and classification of sins that has often been borrowed by our
Protestant and Puritan divines. His classification is made, as will be
seen, on an ascending scale of guilt and aggravation. In the world of
sin, he says, there are, first, sins of ignorance; next, there are sins
of infirmity; and then, at the top, there are sins of presumption. And
this, it will be remembered, was the Psalmist's inventory and estimate of
sins also. His last and his most earnest prayer was, that he might be
kept back from all presumptuous sin. Now you know quite well, without
any explanation, what presumption is. Don't presume, you say, with
rising and scarce controlled anger. Don't presume too far. Take care,
you say, with your heart beating so high that you can scarcely command
it, take care lest you go too far. And the word of God feels and speaks
about presumptuous sin very much as you do yourself. Now, what gave this
third man who lay in fetters a little beyond the cross the name of
Presumption was just this, that he had been at the cross with his past
sin, and had left the cross to commit the same sin at the first
opportunity. Presumption presumed upon his pardon. He presumed upon the
abounding