Hourly Sanctity

Another unpublished letter from Bishop Handley Moule is precious in its tenderness, simplicity, and truth: "Your account to me of your spiritual trouble, intermittences and variability in the joy and strength of the soul's life, and so in power of witness, comes as close to home to me as possible. Do you think I know nothing of what you describe? Many a word of yours is exactly the picture of what I have once and again to say to our Lord and Master in secret.

And as a comment on it, for you and for me, I would very briefly say:

1. We must remember for a certain sort of comfort that 'in this tabernacle' we have to reckon with an element of physical weakness and strain which is only physical, and which should only give occasion for fresh reliance and the Divinely generous sympathy of our Lord.

2. Yet that to a very large degree even this may -and shall- be met by the two concurrent methods of

(a) Quiet taking of pains, the loving ' Methodism ' of the Christian life; resolution in keeping time for prayer and Bible, as we keep time for meals; resolution in breaking silence to the Lord when we feel indisposed to do so at our times of prayer.

(b) Very simple application, thing by thing, with a soul kept awake by that sort of painstaking, to Him -ever present- for just that fulness of the Spirit which means His own blessed sufficiency for doing the next thing in Him and for Him.

We must 'keep at it,' only remembering, as at the very first when we saw the blessedness of the promise, to apply our keeping at it at the right point -His power to meet, to keep, to bless, to LOVE us back to strength, rest, and readiness."

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