always as you proceed, it becomes more and more narrow, till it strips a
man bare, and sometimes threatens to close upon him and crush him to the
earth altogether. Our Lord in as many words tells us all that. Strive,
He says, strive every day. For many shall seek to enter into the way of
salvation, but because they do not early enough, and long enough, and
painfully enough strive, they come short, and are shut out. Have you,
then, anything in your religious life that Christ will at last accept as
the striving He intended and demanded? Does your religion cause you any
real effort--Christ calls it _agony_? Have you ever had, do you ever
have, anything that He would so describe? What cross do you every day
take up? In what thing do you every day deny yourself? Name it. Put
your finger on it. Write it in cipher on the margin of your Bible. Would
the most liberal judgment be able to say of you that you have any fear
and trembling in the work of your salvation? If not, I am afraid there
must be some mistake somewhere. There must be great guilt somewhere. At
your parents' door, or at your minister's, or, if their hands are clean,
then at your own. Christ has made it plain to a proverb, and John Bunyan
has made it a nursery and a schoolboy story, that the way to heaven is
steep and narrow and lonely and perilous. And that, remember, not a few
of the first miles of the way, but all the way, and even through the dark
valley itself. 'Almost all that is said in the New Testament of men's
watching, giving earnest heed to themselves, running the race that is set
before them, striving and agonising, fighting, putting on the whole
armour of God, pressing forward, reaching forth, crying to God day and
night; I say, almost all that we have in the New Testament on these
subjects is spoken and directed to the saints. Where those things are
applied to sinners seeking salvation once, they are spoken of the saints'
prosecution of their salvation ten times' (Jonathan Edwards). If you
have a life at all like that, you will be sorely tempted to think that
such suffering and struggle, increasing rather than diminishing as life