They compass a man’s heels.  He cannot trample them down.  The fashion of the evils that compass us determines the form of the fight we wage with them.  Preparations that might amply suffice the city in the day when an army with banners comes against it are no good at all if a plague has to be fought.  So there is a way we have to take with ‘the iniquity at our heels.’  It calls for much patience and much prayer.  If we cannot prevent sin from following us, we can at least prevent ourselves from turning and following it.  A man can always choose his path if he cannot at every moment determine his company.  And as a man goes onward and upward steadfastly toward the City of Light, the evil things fall off and drop behind, and God shall bring him where no evil thing dare follow, and where no ravenous beast shall stalk its prey.

The battle with sin is not an incident in the Christian life; it is the abiding condition of it.  While there are some temptations that we have to slay, there are others we have to outgrow.  They are overcome, not by any one supreme assertion of the will, but by the patient cultivation of all the loftiest and most wholesome and delicate and intensely spiritual modes of feeling and of being.

Again, let me suggest that iniquity at our heels is sometimes an old sin in a new form.  You remember the difficulty that Hiawatha had in hunting down Pau-puk Keewis.  That mischievous magician assumed the form of a beaver, then that of a bird, then that of a serpent; and though each in turn was slain, the magician escaped and mocked his pursuer.  Surely a parable of our strife with sin.  We smite it in one form and it comes to life in another.  One day a man is angry—­clenched fingers and hot words.  He conquers his anger; but the next day there is a spirit of bitterness rankling in his heart, and maybe a tinge of regret that he did not say and do more when his heart was hot within him and fire was on his lips.  The sin he faced and fought yesterday has become iniquity at his heels.  Having failed to knock him down, it tries to trip him up.  Maybe many waste their energies trying to deal with the forms of sin, and never grapple with the fact of sin.  Hence the evil things that compass men’s souls about with their dread ministries of suggestion, and flutter on unhallowed wings in the wake of life.  The sin that confronts us reveals to us our need of strength, but the sin that dogs our steps has, maybe, a deeper lesson to teach us—­even our need of heart-deep holiness.  Good resolution will do much to clear the path ahead, but only purity of character can rid us of the persistent haunting peril of the sin that plucks at the skirt of life.  The deliverance God offers to the struggling soul covers not only the hour of actual grappling with the foe, but all the hours when it is the stealth and not the strength of evil that we most have cause to fear.