Personal religion, therefore, needs constantly to be submitted to new tests, lest it lapse into an attitude of finality. Fortunately for us, God does not leave the matter wholly in our hands, but Himself, through His Providence, applies a wide variety of tests to us. It is often a bitter and disturbing experience to have our comfortable routine broken up and to find that we have quite miserably failed under very simple temptations. And the sort of failure I am thinking of is not so much the failure of sin as the failure of ideal. It is the case of those who think that they have satisfactorily worked out the problems of the spiritual life, and have reached a satisfactory adjustment of duty and practice, and then find that if the adjustment changes their practice falls off. The outer circumstances of life change and the change is followed by a readjustment of the inner life on a distinctly lower plane. It is revealed to us that the outer circumstances were controlling the spiritual practice, and not the practice dominating the circumstances. The ruling ideal was that of comfort, and under the new circumstances the spiritual ideal is lowered until it fits in with a new possibility of comfort in the altered circumstances. It is well to examine ourselves on these matters and to find what is the actual ruling motive in our religious practice. We may have assumed that we have Jesus, when all the assumption meant was that we thought that He was somewhere about. After all, it will not aid us very much if He is "in the company," if we go on our day's journey without Him. It is a poor assumption to build life upon, that Jesus exists, or that He is in the Church, or that He is the Saviour. It is nothing to us unless He is _our_ Saviour, unless He is personally present in us and with us. And it is not wise or safe to let this be a matter of assumption, even though the assumption rest on a perfectly valid experience in the past; we cannot live on history, not even on our own history. That Jesus is with us must be verified day by day, and we ought to go no day's journey without the certainty of His presence. We can best do that, when the circumstances of life permit, by a daily communion. There at the altar we meet Jesus and know that He is with us. When the circumstances of life do not permit, (and often they do, when we lazily think they do not) there are other modes of arriving at spiritual certainty.