The other factor that enters into this spiritual life is abiding. Anna “departed not from the Temple.” She waited patiently. Go back to that night in Shiloh, ere the lamps of God had gone out, and note how Samuel the child became Samuel the prophet by waiting on God in a listening attitude and prompt obedience. Follow Paul from the vision on Anti-Lebanon to the prisons of Nero, and the roadway of his Christian life is literally paved with waiting and prompt obedience, and both the seer and the apostle give us the rule of spiritual expansion, and set the step for all the regiments of the heavenly-minded. An eminent divine has said, “Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known,” and a greater than this divine has said, “He that doeth truth cometh to the light.” The secret of all soul degeneracy, of a seared conscience and a blunted moral sense, alas! we all know too well, is disobedience to the heavenly visions. Like Eli, our eyes are grown dim, and like Paul’s fellow-travelers to Damascus, we hear a sound, but no articulate voice of call. “To obey,” said the great and good Samuel to the disobedient Saul, “is better than sacrifice.” It is because of disobedience to the clear visions of duty there is so much of moral “near-sightedness” in the modern Christian life. The options of spiritual life or death are always with us, to see or not to see, to know or not to know. Here is the power and the peril of the Church our Saviour purchased at the price of His own blood; here is her strength and her weakness; for the dominant danger in the Church of our time, with its wealth, its average moralities and its social compromises, is unspirituality, when the lines of division between a refined worldliness and a perfunctory Christianity are so vague that both seem so near alike to many professed followers of Jesus as not to know where worldliness ends and the Christian rule commences. An unspiritual life is the real apostacy which clogs the chariot wheels of God and dims the eye to the King in His excellent glory.