Offer frankincense, or you will have no gold to offer. When you open your treasures, if there is not plenty of incense--that is, prayer--you will find the chest, in which you thought there was much gold, to be empty. For without prayer there is no charity or love of God. Prayer is the food by which you nourish and keep charity alive and on the increase. Prayer is the capital in trade by which you are to make your fortune in the charity of God to enrich you for eternity. And having offered your gold and frankincense, do not forget the myrrh. And what is signified by myrrh? It means self-denial, or, as it is more commonly called, mortification. I wish we all understood the value of self-denial better than we do, because nearly all the miseries which afflict the soul come from the fact that we do not deny ourselves as much as we ought. We give the reins to our natural desires and inclinations, and they run away with us. Just as if we were driving a span of spirited horses, and instead of putting a curb-bit upon them and holding them in, we should throw the reins down upon their necks and let them go without restraint. When they once begin to go fast, they break into a headlong race, and never stop until they have dashed everything in pieces. Thus we let our desires for amusement and pleasure run away with us, until we find our pious resolutions and the spirit of devotion entirely gone, and drowned in the sea of forgetfulness. {38} How can we love God if we be absorbed in a love of good eating and drinking? Can God come and take up His abode in a soul which occupies itself and is taken up with the satisfaction of sumptuous fare, rich meats, and choice wines or liquors. Such souls are vividly described in Holy Scripture: "For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping) that they are enemies of the cross of Christ; whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is in their shame; who mind earthly things." [Footnote 7] [Footnote 7: Philip., iii. 18, 19.] How can God give Himself to the man who is absorbed in money-making and heaping up possessions? It is impossible for such a soul to enjoy the presence of God. Neither can He divide the empire of the soul with worldly honors, nor even with a passionate human love of wife or children. He is God, and they are creatures, the mere work of His hand. They shall pass away and be gone, and He shall remain. Such inordinate love is like disgusting vermin in the mansion of the soul, and all such vermin must be swept out. What ever we love must be loved on account of God, and in subordination to His love, or God will not come and take up His abode with us. This is the plain dictate of our reason. {39}