'This place,' says the Pauline author of the _Holy War_--'This place the King intended but for Himself alone, and not for another with Him.' But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart--this, namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with you in this life.

Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart, and all the doors of your heart, as if you were watching Christ's heart for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will have no idea of the arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of the undertaking.
'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes; She's lost by one, becomes another's prize.
Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend Her weal or woe and that world without end.
Wherefore she must be more concern'd than they Whose fears begin and end the self-same day.' 'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter, writing about the Civil War.

'But we were all very much mistaken,' sardonically adds Carlyle.

Yes; and you will be very much mistaken too if you enter on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in your members, with powder and shot for one engagement only.

When you enlist here, lay well to heart that it is for life.