When you have given over the practice of stated prayer, you gradually become weaker without knowing it … Men first leave off private prayer; then they neglect the due observance of the Lord’s day (which is a stated service of the same kind); then they gradually let slip from their minds the very idea of obedience to a fixed eternal law; then they actually allow themselves in things which their conscience condemns; then they lose the direction of their conscience, which being ill used, at length refuses to direct them. And thus, being left by their true inward guide, they are obliged to take another guide, their reason, which by itself knows little or nothing about religion; then this their blind reason forms a system of right or wrong for them, as well as it can, flattering to their own desires, and presumptuous where it is not actually corrupt … Such is the course of disobedience, beginning in (apparently) slight omissions, and ending in open unbelief …’
John Cardinal Newman
Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Rivingtons, London, 1873,
Sermon 19, Times of Private Prayer
