[1] If this be the case with any of us, if, with the busy
occupation of the hands in the furtherance of religious
objects, we have glimpsed the inward life of communion with
God to decline, how painfully do we resemble those virgins
who took no heed to provide for their dying lamps a
continual supply of oil! The profession which we have made
before men, however bright its blaze, will one day be shown
to have been delusive--to have been destitute of those
animating principles of faith and love from which alone can
flow an acceptable service.--_Goulburn._
[2] God requires us to set a strict watch over its outgoings--a
watch such as sentinels keep over the persons and goods
which pass out of a city whose allegiance to the sovereign
is suspected--to curb and quell at the earliest outbreak
every rising of vanity, temper, bitterness, passion, and
lust--to drag forth from its dark recesses and to stay
every cherished iniquity which has found there a harbour
and a hiding-place. Our own heart is a vineyard over which
God hath set every one of us to dress it and to keep it. We
are to extirpate the soil's poisonous produce, and to
implore upon the soil of this vineyard the precious dews of
the Divine Spirit, which may remedy its native barrenness
and turn it from a desert into the garden of the
Lord.--_Goulburn._ See also H. E. I. 1841, 1842, 2695-2708.