der the obedience of Christ. Lest His anger for
all that begin to burn to-night, make your bed with Eli and Samuel in His
sanctuary to-night, lest the avenger of the blood of the commandments
leap out on you in your sleep!

4. The Old Serpent took with him the great shears of hell, and clipped
'Thou shalt surely die' out of the second chapter of Genesis. And the
same enemy of mankind will clip all the terror of the Lord out of your
heart to-night again, if he can. And he will do it in this way, if he
can. He will have some one at the church door ready and waiting for you.
As soon as the blessing is pronounced, some one will take you by the arm
and will entertain you with the talk you love, or that you once loved,
till you will be ashamed to confess that there is any terror or turning
to God in your heart. No! Thou shalt not surely die, says the serpent
still. Why, hast thou not trampled Sabbaths and sermons past counting
under thy feet? What commandment, laid on body or soul, hast thou not
broken, and thou art still adding drunkenness to thirst, and God doth not
know! 'The woman said unto the serpent, We may not eat of it, neither
may we touch it, lest we die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye
shall not surely die.'

5. You must all have heard of Clito, who used to say that he desired no
more time for rising and dressing and saying his prayers than about a
quarter of an hour. Well, that was clipping the thing pretty close,
wasn't it? At the same time it must be admitted that a good deal of
prayer may be got through in a quarter of an hour if you do not lose any
moment of it. Especially in the first quarter of the day, if you are
expeditious enough to begin to pray before you even begin to dress. And
prayer is really a very strange experience. There are things about
prayer that no man has yet fully found out or told to any. For one
thing, once well began it grows upon a man in a most extraordinary and
unheard-of way. This same Clito for instance, some time after we find
him at his prayers before his eyes are open; and then he keeps all
morning making his bath, his soap, his towels, his brushes, and his
clothes all one long artifice of prayer. And that till there is not a
single piece of his dressing-room furniture that is not ready to swear at
the last day that its master long before he died had become a man full of
secret prayer. There is a fountain filled with blood! he exclaims, as he
throw