the flesh and to be living close to Christ; but when we are within the
fiery circle of trial or temptation, when sinful desires arise, or
passions are strong, or solicitations to evil are subtle and enticing,
then we are only too ready to catch at any hopes about the vague future.
To the unstable and incontinent, to those whose nature is weak while
their conscience is not dead, this hope is a dangerous temptation,
beguiling them with the suggestion that some day there will open before
them an easy path to that virtue or self-denial to which the way is too
rough at present. "Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from
the dead, they will repent." By-and-by, they say, as they dream about
the future, God will lay His hand upon them; the Holy Spirit will touch
their souls with new life; they will receive in some inscrutable way new
power, and in the exercise of this power they will cast off the bondage
of sin or weakness; but how and by what means this great and necessary
change is to be brought about they do not stop to think, and meanwhile
they yield to worldly or fleshly appetite, trusting vaguely to an
uncertain future for some Divine gift.

If you look into the thoughts and habits of your life, some of you may be
compelled to acknowledge that this case is not unfamiliar to you. So men
sometimes dally with a temptation, and linger beside it, courting its
company, instead of flinging it away from them, as the snare of the
devil, because of some secret hope that by-and-by God will place them out
of the way of it, or give them some new strength against it, which as yet
has not been given. How easy it is for us to entice ourselves in this
way out of the narrow path of present duty into the tangled wilderness of
a weak and sinful life, from which escape becomes every day more
difficult.

And this enticement along the ways of sin being so easy, it may be