ther
little or big foxes, yea, and all other animals, ever coming to life
again.

SPIRITUAL DECLENSION.

A want of interest in the duties of secret devotion is a mark of
religious declension. It is well said that prayer is the Christian's
vital breath. A devout spirit is truly the life and soul of godliness.
The soul can not but delight in communion with what it loves with warm
affection. The disciple, when his graces are in exercise, does not enter
into his closet and shut the door, that he may pray to his Father who is
in secret, merely because it is a duty which must be done, but because
it is a service which he delights to render, a pleasure which he is
unwilling to forego. He goes to the mercy-seat as the thirsty hart goes
to the refreshing brook. The springs of his strength are there. There he
has blessed glimpses of his Savior's face, and unnumbered proofs of his
affection.

But sometimes the professing Christian comes to regard the place of
secret intercourse with God with very different feelings. He loses,
perhaps by a process so gradual that he is scarcely conscious of it for
a time, the tenderness of heart, and the elevation and fervor of devout
affection that he had been used to feel in meeting God. There is less
and less of spirit and more and more of form in his religious exercises.
He retires at the accustomed time rather from force of habit than
because inclination draws him. He is enclined to curtail his seasons of
retirement or to neglect it altogether if a plausible pretext can be
found. He reproaches himself, perhaps, but hopes that the evil will cure
itself at length. And so he goes on from day to day, and week to week.
Prayer--if his heartless service deserves the name--affords him no
pleasure and adds nothing to his strength. Where such a state of things
exists it is evident that the pulses of spiritual life are ebbing fast.
If the case is yours, dear reader, it ought to fill you with alarm.
Satan is gaining an advantage of you and seducing you from God.

A second sign of spiritual declension is indifference to the usual means
of grace. The spiritual life, not less than the natural life, requires
appropriate and continual nourishment. For this want God has made ample
provision in his Word. To the faithful-disciple the Scriptures are rich
in interest and profit. "O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all
the day." To such a soul the preaching of the gospel is a joyful sound;
and th