mplish, they find the whole spiritual
routine dull and unattractive and naturally tend to reduce it to a
minimum. It is not at all surprising that in the end they drop religion
altogether, as why should one keep on travelling a road that leads
nowhere? How can one love and serve a Jesus whom one has lost?

The problem of personal religion is the problem of finding Jesus, of
bringing life into a right relation to Him. The plain path is to follow
the example of His parents who sought Him "sorrowing." Sorrow for having
lost Jesus is the true repentance. Repentance which springs from fear of
consequences, or from disgust with our own incompetence and stupidity
when we realise that we have made a spiritual failure of life, is an
imperfect thing. True repentance has its origin in love and is therefore
directed toward a person. It is the conviction that we have violated the
love of our Father, our Saviour, our Sanctifier. Sorrow springing from
love is sorrow "after a godly sort." It is easy for us to drift into
ways of carelessness and indifference which seem not to involve sin, to
be no more than a decline from some preceding standard of practice which
we conclude to have been unnecessarily strict; but the result is an
increasing disregard of spiritual values, a growing obscuration of the
divine presence in life. Then the day comes when some quite marked and
positive spiritual failure, a failure of which we cannot imagine
ourselves to have been guilty, when we were living in constant communion
with our Lord, arouses us to the fact that for months our spiritual
vitality has been declining and that we have ended in losing Jesus. It
is a tremendous shock to find how fast and how far we have been
travelling when we thought that we were only slightly relaxing an
unnecessarily strict routine: that when we thought that we were but
acting "in a common sense way," we were in reality effecting a
compromise with the world. Well is it then if the surprise of our
disaster shocks us back to the recovery of what we have lost, if it send
us into the streets of the city, sorrowing and seeking for Jesus.

Mere spiritual laziness is at the bottom of much failure in religion.
There is no success anywhere in life save through the constant pressure
of the will driving a reluctant and protesting set of nerves and muscles
to their daily tasks. The day labourer comes home from his work with his
muscular strength exhausted, but he has to go back to th