Add to this, religion is shorn of its glory when it is dwarfed into a mere thing of sentiment and feeling. Its true grandeur and greatness is, when it incorporates itself with active duty, and fulfils its best definition as not a "_being_" but a "_doing_." Of nothing, therefore, do we require to be more jealous, than a guilty, unmanly, morbid dwelling on feelings and experiences. You remember Elijah, when he fled pusillanimous and panic-stricken from his work, and took to a hermit-cell amid the solitudes of Sinai. We find him seated in his lonely cave, his head drooping on his breast, sullen thought mantling his brow, muttering his querulous soliloquy, "I am left alone." The voice of God hunts out the fugitive from duty. "What doest thou here, Elijah? Why in this cave, brooding in a coward spirit, unworthy of thee? Art thou to cease to work for _Me_, because the high day of excitements on the heights of Carmel are over? Here is food to strengthen thy body, and here is 'the still, small voice' of my love to strengthen thy soul. Go forth to active duty. Leave thy cave and thy cloak behind thee. Take thy pilgrim-staff and scrip, and with the consciousness of a great work in hand, and a brief time to do it in, arise, and onward to Horeb, the mount of God!" (1 Kings xix.) * * * * * But having thrown out these preliminary cautions, the question occurs: _Are_ there no cases of spiritual depression or desertion, arising purely from _spiritual_ causes? We answer, Yes. The Bible recognises such Spiritual darkness--absence of all spiritual comfort and joy--is no figment of man's theological creed. It is a sad and solemn verity--the experience, too, of God's own children. "Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, _that walketh in darkness, and hath no light_?" (Isa. l. 10.) "Oh," says the afflicted patriarch of Uz, "that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; when his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness." (Job xxix. 2, 3.) "In my prosperity," is the testimony of David, at a later period of his life, "I said, I shall never be moved. Lord, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong: _thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled_." (Ps. xxx. 5-7.) "I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: _I sought him, but I found him not_.... My beloved had _withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer_." (Sol. Song iii. 2, v. 6.) Can we forget a more awful and impressive example? ONE soaring above the reach of all grovelling human experiences, but yet who tells us, in His bitter Eloi cry, that even HE knew what it was to be God-deserted and forsaken!