our road to heaven; in a hundred places in the wisest and deepest books
of the heathen world we read the same warning; notably in the Greek
Tablet of Cebes, which reads almost as if it had been cut out of the
Sermon on the Mount. 'Do you not see,' says the old man, 'a little door,
and beyond the door a way which is not much crowded, for very few are
going along it, it is so difficult of access, so rough, and so stony?'
'Yes,' answers the stranger. 'And does there not seem,' subjoins the old
man, 'to be a high hill and the road up it very narrow, with precipices
on each side? Well, that is the way that leads to the true instruction.'
'A cause is not good,' says Rutherford in another of his pungent books,
'because it is followed by many. Men come to Zion in ones and twos out
of a whole tribe, but they go to hell in their thousands. The way to
heaven is overgrown with grass; there are the traces of but few feet on
that way, only you may see here and there on it the footprints of
Christ's bloody feet to let you know that you are not gone wrong but are
still on the right way.'

2. Remember also that other word of our Lord,--that heaven is like a
fortress in this, that it must be taken by force. Only our Lord means
that the force must not be done to the gates or the walls of heaven, but
to our own hard hearts and evil lives. 'I find it hard to be a
Christian,' writes Rutherford to Rusco. 'There is no little thrusting
and thringing to get in at heaven's gates. Heaven is a strong castle
that has to be taken by force.' 'Oh to have one day more in my pulpit in
Aberdeen!' cried a great preacher of that day when he was dying. 'What
would you do?' asked another minister who sat at his bedside. 'I would
preach to the people the difficulty of salvation,' said the dying man.
'Remember,' wrote Rutherford to Rusco from the same city, 'Remember that
it is violent sweating and striving that alone taketh heaven.'