is to have crucified 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 happening to
some of you. You may feel that, judged even by your own standard, which is more likely to be too low than too high, your life is somehow unsatisfactory; your better instincts may be telling you that you were born for something higher, purer, stronger than what you are or have been; and you are cherishing the hope that it will be different with you some day; your circumstances, you think, or your occupation, or your companionship will have changed, and so you fondly imagine that you yourself will be sure to change, as if your soul were just a weathercock that answers to every changing breeze. So perhaps you hope that some habit of self-indulgence or idleness will drop off, or some evil temper be eradicated; and whilst all this vague and mischievous dreaming goes on you yield very likely to some besetting sin, making no serious effort to get away from it now, and you yield all the more because of this misleading hope that some day you will be touched by a supernatural hand, and
will rise up to a regenerate life. And yet our reason tells us that all this is the very essence of self-deceit, and that such dreams and hopes are the devil’s most subtle temptation. This kind of vain hope is based on a complete misconception of the nature of our conflict with sin, and the way to escape from it. To think thus of spiritual gifts and the growth of the spiritual life, is to follow a very dangerous delusion. It was just such a misunderstanding that is expressed in the hope of Dives about his brethren: “If one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.” Their ordinary daily teachings, he seems to say, the voice of Moses and of the prophets, the examples of good men around them, the warnings, the exhortations, these, being so familiar, may not have startled them out of their sin; but if only one were to go to them from the dead, some messenger of strange voice and aspect, who had seen hell, and could paint its horrors, then surely the course of their life would be
checked and changed, and their spirit would wake up in them, and they would sin no more. But to all this comes back the stern warning of the Divine answer: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”
And we may profitably consider what this means in its application to our own life. Such a warning is evidently meant to remind us that the mystery of sin in human life is not to be got rid of by any such reliance on vague hopes. This mystery of sin in the heart and life, misleading, weakening, dragging us down, means in fact the subtle, poisonous, creeping power which evil inclinations exercise over a weak and depraved will. Are we, then, to trust to some sudden visitation from above, for which we make no preparation, to break down or overthrow a power of this kind? On the contrary, the words of this parable stand here to declare to us that it is nothing less than perversity and folly in
any man to go on either defiling his nature, or degrading it, or even neglecting to strengthen and support it, under this delusion that some day the breath of Heaven will sweep it clean or give it new vigour. And your own experience is in exact accordance with these parabolic warnings of the Saviour. You know that your moral and spiritual nature is now at this present time undergoing a process of continual and momentous change, that every day, or week, or month leaves its mark upon it; and that your soul’s life means not waiting for some angel of God’s providential grace to visit you and carry you up into a new air; but it means that you are weaving the web of your unchangeable destiny by your use or abuse of the gifts of God that are in your hands to-day.
Born into the world with the taint of inherited corruption in us, as also with the germs of pure affection and high instinct and purpose, we have to take care