safety. If the road is narrow it is the better guide, and they who
travel along it travel safely. Restrictions and limitations are of the
essence of all nobleness and virtue. 'So did not I because of the fear
of the Lord.'

Set side by side with that the competing path. Wide? Yes! 'Do as you
like'--that is sufficiently wide. And even where that gospel of the
animal has not become the guide to a man, there are many occupations,
pursuits, recreations which men who lack the supreme concentration and
consecration that come through over mastering love to Jesus Christ who
has redeemed them, may legitimately in their own estimation do, but
which no Christian man should do.

But, as I said before about the gates, it is not so easy as it looks to
walk the broad road, nor so hard as it seems to tread the narrow one.
For 'her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace';
and, on the other hand, licentiousness and liberty are not the same
thing, and true freedom is not to do as you like, but to like to do as
you ought. Besides, the path which looks attractive, and tempts to the
indulgence of many appetites and habits which a Christian man must
rigidly subdue, does not continue so attractive. Earthly pleasures have
a strange knack of losing their charm, and, at the same time, increasing
their hold, with familiarity. Many a man who has plunged into some kind
of dissipation because of the titillation of his senses which he found
in it, discovers that the titillation diminishes and the tyranny grows;
and that when he thought that he had bought a joy, he has sold himself
slave to a master.

So, dear friends, and especially you young people, let me beseech you
to be suspicious of courses of conduct which come to you with the
whisper, 'pleasant, sweet.' If you have two things before you, one of
which is easy and the other hard, ninety times out of a hundred it will
be safe for you to choose the hard one, and the odd ten times it will be
at least as well for you to choose it. 'Thus we travel to the stars.' As
one of our poets has it, 'the path of duty is the way of glory,' and
those that 'scorn delights and live laborious days,' and listen not to
the voices that say 'Come and enjoy this,' but to the sterner voice that
says 'Come and bear this'--these will

'Find the stubborn thistles bursting
Into glossy purples that outredden
All voluptuous garden roses.'

So, because the road is narrow, therefore choo