What a mighty influence this world exerts over us ! It is ever interweaving something into the framework of our life; drawing a film between the soul and God, and deadening the sensibility of our spiritual perceptions. Like the law of gravitation, which takes effect wherever it is not specially counteracted, so is it in our intercourse with the world. There is an influence ever ready to enter the soul through our eyes and ears, smothering every thing that would lead to something higher; and each day drawing a fresh, hard layer over the heart.

For all this, we need a strong counteracting influence. Our life is too outward; we are not enough alone with God; we live in the unreal, and become unreal ourselves. There must be the calmness of intercourse with God. God's presence is full of reality; and His presence must be the antidote to the withering blight and the hourly infection of the world. The duplicities of the heart, which the world interweaves are held in check by habitual communion with God. This is the only counteracting and transforming influence; if we are not under it, the world will most surely conform us to itself. If we would maintain communion with God, we must be watchful. We must watch against sin, against the world, and against self.

We must watch against sin. Nothing so darkens the soul as sin, or produces so deadening an insensibility; and it gains an entrance with inconceivable subtlety. Just as we contract slight peculiarities of manner, tone, and gait without knowing it, in like manner does the soul become warped and darkened by sin. When it is at the worst, it is least perceived. Thus we come to live without any true relation to the presence of God; consenting to the darkness of our own hearts; cold and dead in our affections; formal and lifeless in prayer; and the whole moral and spiritual nature estranged from God. Pride, vanity, self-complacency, envy, passion, etc.-all follow in the train of this spiritual deterioration.

This is the cause of much of the insensibility and deadness. Sins unconfessed and forgotten lie festering in the dark. It obstructs the spiritual life, and thrusts itself between the soul and the presence of God.

For all this, there is only one remedy-immediate and sincere confession. Come and throw yourself in the arms of everlasting Love! Open your heart, with all its sins and stains, to Jesus. His love is the light in which we shall see our sins, and the light in which we shall see them forgiven.

If sins be allowed to linger, they will only taint and estrange it more :the sins and spiritual decay of today will run on into to-morrow, and these decays will be always advancing.

The true secret of preserving spirituality of mind, and maintaining our communion with God is, to bring our sin to Jesus the moment it is committed, while it is fresh on the soul. In the street, in the routine of every-day life, let the heart go up to Him in unreserved confession. Let us guard against hesitation. Delay opens the door for forgetfulness. The suggestions of God's Spirit are like the flowing of the tide, which, taken at the full, will lift us over every bar; if we tarry and lose them, we are stranded! Let us go at once to the Lord with them all. So shall the "blood of sprinkling" be precious to our souls, and we shall "walk with God."
We must watch against the world. On many Christians, this world weighs heavily, and lowers them to its own standard. All its efforts are exerted to shut out the stern reality of the Cross. Its pleasures and amusements, its mirth and its songs, its religion and its worship, cannot go with us into the presence of the Lord. Let us watch against the standard and tone of its society, as well as against the spirit of its social life.

We must watch against self-pride. Unless God be the center of the soul, it will be a center to itself. Such a spirit is a deliberate contradiction of Him who made Himself of no reputation. Let us watch against ourselves-our self-pleasing and self-love ; our tempers and our spirits ; let us test them in His presence. There we shall see them as they are. There we shall learn the true character of them and of ourselves. In the light of His presence, there are no illusions. All the colors and shadows, the false and changeable hues, the gloss and the glitter which we put upon ourselves in the light of the world, and even in the light of our own conscience, are there dispelled. Thus shall our souls be filled with His brightness, and we shall "glorify God both in our bodies and in our spirits, which are God's." -Selected