Many a fine road has become miry and foul because it has not been properly cared for; but my text says the unclean shall not walk on this one.  Room on either side to throw away your sins.  Indeed, if you want to carry them along, you are not on the right road.  That bridge will break, those overhanging rocks will fall, the night will come down, leaving you at the mercy of the mountain bandits, and at the very next turn of the road you will perish.  But if you are really on this clean road of which I have been speaking, then you will stop ever and anon to wash in the water that stands in the basin of the eternal rock.  Ay, at almost every step of the journey you will be crying out:  “Create within me a clean heart!” If you have no such aspirations as that, it proves that you have mistaken your way; and if you will only look up and see the finger-board above your head, you may read upon it the words:  “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death.”  Without holiness no man shall see the Lord; and if you have any idea that you can carry along your sins, your lusts, your worldliness, and yet get to the end of the Christian race, you are so awfully mistaken that, in the name of God, this morning I shatter the delusion.

III.  Still further, the road spoken of is a plain road.  “The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.”  That is, if a man is three fourths an idiot, he can find this road just as well as if he were a philosopher.  The imbecile boy, the laughing-stock of the street, and followed by a mob hooting at him, has only just to knock once at the gate of heaven, and it swings open:  while there has been many a man who can lecture about pneumatics, and chemistry, and tell the story of Farraday’s theory of electrical polarization, and yet has been shut out of heaven.  There has been many a man who stood in an observatory and swept the heavens with his telescope, and yet has not been able to see the Morning Star.  Many a man has been familiar with all the higher branches of mathematics, and yet could not do the simple sum, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Many a man has been a fine reader of tragedies and poems, and yet could not “read his title clear to mansions in the skies.”  Many a man has botanized across the continent, and yet not know the “Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.”  But if one shall come in the right spirit, crying the way to heaven, he will find it a plain way.  The pardon is plain.  The peace is plain.  Everything is plain.

He who tries to get on the road to heaven through the New Testament teaching will get on beautifully.  He who goes through philosophical discussion will not get on at all.  Christ says:  “Come to Me, and I will take all your sins away, and I will take all your troubles away.”  Now what is the use of my discussing it any more?  Is not that plain?  If you wanted to go to Albany, and I pointed you out a highway thoroughly laid out, would