vigor; of mistaking the pleasure they feel in the performance of duty, for real submission to the will of God; and above all, of shrinking from new truths which would, for the time, confuse their belief, and break up the calm symmetry of their lives. * * * * * For … different natures require and receive a very different discipline from God. Sometimes it is by outward affliction that God speaks to souls, thus sinking into the lethargy of formalism; and the loss of friends, or health, or influence suddenly seems to cut off, as it were, half the means of serving him, and to rouse long-forgotten temptations to rise up against his will. Sometimes, on the other hand, he speaks to them inwardly, by opening their eyes to heights of holiness which they had never before steadily contemplated. They now suddenly perceive that many of the fancied duties which have till now occupied their lives and satisfied their consciences, have long ceased to be duties, and have come to be mere habits or pleasures; and that while they have been thus living in self love, unseen and unrepented of, they might have been coming to the knowledge of the higher obligations to which they have been so blind, but which were all implied in their first belief if they had but continued to read it with a single eye.—_From Susanna Winkworth, in “Tauler’s Life and Times.”_ [_July 13._] Especially, too, if they be distracted and disheartened (as such are wont to be) by the sin and confusion of the world; by the amount of God’s work which still remains undone, and by their own seeming incapacity to do it, they will take heart from the history of John Tauler and his fellows, who, in a far darker and more confused time than the present, found a work to do and strength to do it; who, the more they retired into the recesses of their own inner life, found there that fully to know themselves was to know all men, and to have a message for all men; and who by their unceasing labors of love proved that the highest spiritual attainments, instead of shutting a man up in lazy and Pharisaic self-contemplation, drive him forth to work as his Master worked before him, among the poor, the suffering, and the fallen.