these years to break the placidity of our routine. There
has never been any relapse into grievous sin; we have never felt any
real temptation to abandon the practice oL our religion. We run along as
easily and smoothly as a car on well-laid rails. We are "all right."

But in fact we are all wrong. We have lapsed into a state of which the
ideal is purely static: an ideal of spiritual comfort as the goal of our
spiritual experience here on earth. We have acquired what appears to be
a state of equilibrium into which we wish nothing to intrude that would
endanger the balance. We are, no doubt, quite unconsciously, excluding
from life every emotion, every ambition, as well as every temptation,
which appears to involve spiritual disturbance. But we need to be
disturbed.

For the spiritual life is dynamic and not static; its ideal is motion
and not rest. Rest is the quality of dead things, and particularly of
dead souls. The weariness of the way, which is so obvious a phenomenon
in the Christian life, is the infallible sign of lukewarmness. What we
need therefore is to break with the assumption that we know all that it
is necessary to know, and that we have done or are doing all that it is
necessary to do. It is indeed the mark of an ineffective religion that
the notion of necessity is adopted as its stimulus, rather than the
notion of aspiration. The question, "Must I do this?" is a revelation of
spiritual poverty and ineptitude. "I press on," is the motto of a
living religion.

Personal religion, therefore, needs constantly to be submitted to new
tests, lest it lapse into an attitude of finality. Fortunately for us,
God does not leave the matter wholly in our hands, but Himself, through
His Providence, applies a wide variety of tests to us. It is often a
bitter and disturbing experience to have our comfortable routine broken
up and to find that we have quite miserably failed under very simple
temptations. And the sort of failure I am thinking of is not so much the
failure of sin as the failure of ideal. It is the case of those who
think that they have satisfactorily worked out the problems of the
spiritual life, and have reached a satisfactory adjustment of duty and
practice, and then find that if the adjustment changes their practice
falls off. The outer circumstances of life change and the change is
followed by a readjustment of the inner life on a distinctly lower
plane. It is revealed to us that the outer circumstance