ous doctor he had only got
the length of Mouth-gate. But having begun so well with those three
great outposts of the soul, if those two trusty officers only held on,
and played the man courageously enough, they would soon be promoted to
still more important, still more central, and, if more difficult and
dangerous, then also much more honourable and remunerative posts.
Appetite, deep and deadly as its evils are, is, after all, only an
outwork of the soul; and the same sharp knife that the epicure and the
sot in all their stages must put 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