activities, as that they may be turned into helps instead of
hindrances, but which require a great deal of diligence and effort in
order that they should not work like grains of dust that come between
the parts of some nicely-fitting engine, and so cause friction and
disaster. There are all the daily tasks that tempt us to forget the
things that we only know by faith, and to be absorbed in the things
that we can touch and taste and handle. If a man is upon an inclined
plane, unless he is straining his muscles to go upwards, gravitation
will make short work of him, and bring him down. And unless Christian
men grip hard and continually that sense of having fellowship and
peace with God, as sure as they are living they will lose the
clearness of that consciousness, and the calm that comes from it. For
we cannot go into the world and do the work that is laid upon us all
without there being possible hostility to the Christian life in
everything that we meet. Thank God there is possible help, too, and
whether our daily calling is an enemy or a friend to our religion
depends upon the earnestness and continuousness of our own efforts.
But there is a worse force than these external distractions working
to draw us away, one that we carry within, in our own vacillating
wills and wayward hearts and treacherous affections and passions that
usually lie dormant, but wake up sometimes at the most inopportune
periods. Unless we keep a very tight hand upon ourselves, certainly
these will rob us of this consciousness of being justified by faith
which brings with it peace with God that passes understanding.

In the Isle of Wight massive cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the
sea, and seem as if they were as solid as the framework of the earth
itself. But they rest upon a sharply inclined plane of clay, and the
moisture trickles through the rifts in the majestic cliffs above, and
gets down to that slippery substance and makes it like the greased