Exceeding Great Negligence

Do we pray enough? Do we fast...at all? One Puritan wrote many years ago extolling the virtues of these spiritual disciplines, but acknowledging personally that his own practice was deficient. So it is that we know what to do, but too often, the putting into practice of what we know falls woefully short. God grant us the grace to walk according to the light that is given us.

John Yates, "To the Christian Reader," in God's Arraignement of Hypocrites (1616):

Prayer & fasting are of the same nature [as] that [of] preaching and administering the sacraments: they being conscionably used, worke where and whensoever God pleaseth....Fasting and praier are admirable meanes in the Church of God...to fill the soule with the spirit of grace, and goodnes. And here I tremble to speake, and charge mine own heart with exceeding great negligence...