him to remind him of it, the very thing that so fatally turned him back was the best proof possible that he was on the right and the only right way; ay, and fast coming, poor old castaway, to the very city he had at one time set out to seek.  Now, it is only too likely that there are some of my hearers at this with it to-night, that they are on the point of giving up the life of faith, and hope, and love, and holy living; because the deeper they carry that life into their own hearts the more impossible they find it to live that life there.  The more they aim their hearts at God’s law the more they despair of ever coming within sight of it.  My supremely miserable brother! if this is any consolation to you, if you can take any crumb of consolation out of it, let this be told you, that, as a matter of fact, all truly holy men have in their heart of hearts had your very experience.  That is no strange and unheard-of thing which is passing within you.  And, indeed, if you could but believe it, that is one of the surest signs and seals of a true and genuine child of God.  Dante, one of the bravest, but hardest bestead of God’s saints, was, just like you, well-nigh giving up the mountain altogether when his Greatheart, who was always at his side, divining what was going on within him, said to him—­

   “Those scars
   That when they pain thee most then kindliest heal.”

“The more I do,” complained one of Thomas Shepard’s best friends to him, “the worse I am.”  “The best saints are the most sensible of sin,” wrote Samuel Rutherford.  And, again he wrote, “Sin rages far more in the godly than ever it does in the ungodly.”  And you dare not deny but that Samuel Rutherford was one of the holiest men that ever lived, or that in saying all that he was speaking of himself.  And Newman:  “Every one who tries to do God’s will”—­and that also is Newman himself—­“will feel himself to be full of all imperfection and sin; and the more he succeeds in regulating his heart, the more will he discern its original bitterness and guilt.”  As our own hymn has it: 

   “They who fain would serve Thee best
   Are conscious most of wrong within.”

Without knowing it, Mrs. Timorous’s runaway father was speaking the same language as the chief of the saints.  Only he said, “Therefore I have turned back,” whereas, first Christian, and then Christiana his widow, said, “Yet I must venture!”

And so say you.  Say, I must and I will venture!  Say it; clench your teeth and your hands and say it.  Say that you are determined to go on towards heaven where the holy are—­absolutely determined, though you are quite well aware that you are carrying up with you the blackest, the wickedest, the most corrupt, and the most abominable heart either out of hell or in it.  Say that, say all that, and still venture.  Say all that and all the more venture.  Venture upon God of whom such reassuring things are said.  Venture upon the Son of God of whom His