nd you will resist all
the degrading solicitations of the flesh, and will live in the atmosphere
of things that are pure and of good report.

To have conceived such a purpose as this, to have opened your heart to
its influence, to have lived in it even for a little while, to have felt
its purifying and strengthening breath upon your soul even for a few
weeks, may be enough, as some of you know very well, to lift your life up
to a new level, so that it becomes and is felt by you to be a quite
different life from what you lived before--a life of new thoughts, of new
notions about what is good or what is evil, about the degrading character
of sin and the misery and hatefulness of it, as also about the happiness
of a life that is inspired by good aims and purposes, and is free from a
sense of God's wrath upon you for some low standard of conduct, or some
sinful appetite or passion. If you have once felt the influence of this
change in your heart, you know the difference henceforth between the
higher life and the lower, the life that is clinging to God, however
feebly, and is in the way of salvation, and the life of sin which will
inevitably end in degradation and in death.

But this life in Christ to which you are dedicated is not an easy one;
let us not suppose it. It is a noble life, and every one who strives to
live it is doing something to ennoble his society; but it is not an easy
life. It is never so represented to us in the Bible. There is a sense
no doubt in which our Lord invites us to see how easy is His yoke
compared with the yoke of sin--but He Himself calls upon every believer
to take up his cross and follow Him. That call may bring to any of us
not peace but a sword. St. Paul sets the Christian life before us as a
race to be run with patience; as a conflict which will sometimes be very
hard. In St. James we see it as the discipline of sore temptation, and
in St. Peter it is the fiery trial that is to try us.

And again, in the Revelation of St. John, we have this picture of
blessing only to those that endure, and to those who have not defiled
their garments, and those who have come through great tribulation.

And all our personal experience confirms this language of Holy Scripture,
reminding us, as it does, how hard it is for an individual to keep in the
narrow way of the spotless Christian life, and how it is still harder to
stamp the mark of Christian purpose upon a society.

Yet these are the two