e are no real excuse for it, they are
very often quite true. If it were not so, the devil would not be the
dangerous enemy that he assuredly is to our spiritual life; our risk of
failure in our battle with sin would not be so great as experience shows
it to be. We must therefore expect that temptations to sin will
sometimes come upon us quite by surprise and at unlocked for moments, and
that some temptations will linger and cling to us with a hateful
persistence; you must be prepared also to find that some companion may
draw you towards a sin, or a bully may endeavour to drive you into it.
Your life is a happy one if it is free from all such risks, but you
cannot count upon such freedom. So that, if any one begins his life
thinking that his conflict with evil and its manifold temptations is
going to be an easy one, he begins under a dangerous delusion, and he is
likely to end in some disastrous failure.

You desire, let us hope, to keep your soul unstained by evil ways. If,
then, you remember that to secure such a stainless and unpolluted life
you have not only to fight with some external enemy now and then, but
against dark and insidious powers of evil which seem to start up around
you and in the very citadel of your heart unawares, and that except
through a constant sense of God's presence in your life you cannot hope
to keep free from their influence, this feeling should give reality and
earnestness to our daily prayer to be delivered from the evil.

And, indeed, this feeling that our life is set in the midst of many and
great dangers is one of the first requisites for its moral safety. It
stands beside us with its warning, whenever a temptation to some sin
besets us, reminding us that, no matter how pleasant or attractive the
temptation may seem to be, or how trifling the sin that it suggests, it
is in fact an outpost of a great army, whose name is legion, and that we
should hold no parleyings and have no dealings with it, for it breathes
corruption, and it brings degradation and death behind it.

"_Obsta principiis_" may indeed be said to be a warning specially needed
by us in regard to every kind of temptation. But we may go further than
this. Our safety from particular sins depends very often and very
largely, at a critical moment, upon our general attitude and feeling
towards sin in every shape.

It must be acknowledged, I think, that most sins which lay their hold
upon us and master us, or struggle lo