will make me start back before I make Christ cruel or false, a
wine-bibber, a glutton, or unclean. I feel at this moment as if I shall
yet come to ask Him at every meal, and at every other opportunity and
temptation of every kind, what He would have and what He would do before
I go on to take or to do anything myself. What a check, what a
restraint, what an awful scrupulosity that will henceforth work in me!
But, through that, what a pure, blameless, noble, holy and heavenly life
I shall then lead! What bodily pains, diseases, premature decays; what
mental remorses, what shames and scandals, what self-loathings and what
self-disgusts, what cups bitterer to drink than blood, I shall then
escape! Yes, O Paul, I shall henceforth hold with thee that my body is
the temple of Christ, and that I am not my own, but that I am bought with
a transporting price, and can, therefore, do nothing less than glorify
God in my body and in my spirit which are God's. 'This place,' says the
Pauline author of the _Holy War_--'This place the King intended but for
Himself alone, and not for another with Him.'

But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart--this,
namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King
and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or
any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with
you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart,
and all the doors of your heart, as if you were watching Christ's heart
for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will have no idea of the
arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of
the undertaking.

'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes;
She's lost by one, becomes another's prize.
Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend