we only know by faith, and to be absorbed in the things
that we can touch and taste and handle. If a man is upon an inclined
plane, unless he is straining his muscles to go upwards, gravitation
will make short work of him, and bring him down. And unless Christian
men grip hard and continually that sense of having fellowship and
peace with God, as sure as they are living they will lose the
clearness of that consciousness, and the calm that comes from it. For
we cannot go into the world and do the work that is laid upon us all
without there being possible hostility to the Christian life in
everything that we meet. Thank God there is possible help, too, and
whether our daily calling is an enemy or a friend to our religion
depends upon the earnestness and continuousness of our own efforts.
But there is a worse force than these external distractions working
to draw us away, one that we carry within, in our own vacillating
wills and wayward hearts and treacherous affections and passions that
usually lie dormant, but wake up sometimes at the most inopportune
periods. Unless we keep a very tight hand upon ourselves, certainly
these will rob us of this consciousness of being justified by faith
which brings with it peace with God that passes understanding.

In the Isle of Wight massive cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the
sea, and seem as if they were as solid as the framework of the earth
itself. But they rest upon a sharply inclined plane of clay, and the
moisture trickles through the rifts in the majestic cliffs above, and
gets down to that slippery substance and makes it like the greased
ways down which they launch a ship; and away goes the cliff one day,
with its hundreds of feet of buttresses that have fronted the tempest
for centuries, and it lies toppled in hideous ruin on the beach
below. We have all a layer of 'blue slipper' in ourselves, and unless
we take care that no storm-water finds its way down through the
chinks in the rocks above they will slide into awful ruin. 'Being
justified, let us have peace with God,' and remember that the
exhortation is enforced not only by a consideration of the many
strong forces which tend to deprive us of this peace, but also by a
consideration of the hideous disaster that comes upon a man's whole
nature if he loses peace with God. For there is no peace with
ourselves, and there is no peace with man, and there is no peace in
face of the warfare of life and the calamities that are c