"To prepare ourselves for those days of memorial": a Hackney Phalanx sermon for Lent II

From A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year, Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - an extract from a sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent. Pott here sets forth a thoroughly patristic understanding of Lent as a preparation for the celebration of the Lord's Passion, together with the benefits of Lenten observance for the renewal of the interior life.  As mentioned in previous posts in this series, this is striking testimony to the vitality of the liturgical spirituality in the pre-1833 Church of England and, in this particular case, to the observance of Lent:

The subject well deserves our notice at this period of the year; when, as members of one household, who are connected in one form of discipline, and bound to keep one fellowship, we are invited, for wise and beneficial purposes, to prepare ourselves, by special exercises of the mind, and by fit expressions in the life and conduct, for those days of memorial, when the sufferings of our Redeemer are particularly set forth in the pious offices, and solemn celebrations, of the Christian Church.

... where such times of rest and suspension, for the purpose of religious offices, are slighted, in the same proportion will the work and influences of repentance be prevented; and to what degrees the growth of evil habits will arise by such neglects, is plain from evident experience. The benefits, indeed, of those frequent exercises of retired devotion, which distinguished the earlier ages of the Church, are now too plainly disregarded.