Dear brethren, the only really safe way of dealing with God is the generous way. Arouse yourself with high and noble motives to be a real friend of God, faithful and true in things little as well as great, and religion will seem something new and ever so much pleasanter to you. Otherwise you will not have the comfort of being sure of God's friendship at all. You may be like an old lady who once told me very sorrowfully about how her daughter died. "I was watching at her bedside," she said, "and, after a long spell of suffering, she dropped off at last into a gentle slumber. I turned down the lamp and stepped softly into the next room, waiting to hear her call me when she woke up. An hour passed, another hour, a third, and still she slept on. Finally the doctor came, and so we had to wake her up. But oh! when we came to the bedside we found her dead, cold and dead, while I thought her asleep." So your soul may seem to you only sleeping, only lukewarm in God's service, only careless about your religious duties; whereas it may be all the time, if not in the very state of spiritual death--mortal sin--at least in the torpor which goes before it. ------------------- {395} Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Epistle. _Galatians v._ 16-24. Brethren: I say then, walk in the spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the spirit: and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary one to another: so that you do not the things that you would. But if you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are, fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcraft, enmities, contentions, emulations, wrath, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envy, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like. Of the which I foretell you, as I have foretold to you, that they who do such things shall not obtain the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the spirit is charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity. Against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's, have crucified their flesh with the vices and concupiscences. Gospel. _St. Matthew vi._ 24-33.