3.  Remember also that there are many who start well at the bottom of the hill who never get to the top.  We ministers and elders know that only too well; we do not need to be reminded of that.  There are the names of scores and scores of young communicants on our session books of whom we well remember how we boasted about them when they took the foot of the hill, but we never mention their names now, or only with a blush and in a whisper.  Some take to the hill-foot at one age, and some at another; some for one reason and some for another.  A bereavement awakens one, a sickness—­their own or that of some one dear to them—­another; a disappointment in love or in business will sometimes do it; a fall into sin will also do it; a good book, a good sermon, a conversation with a friend who has been some way up the hill; many things may be made use of to make men and women, and young men and women, take a start toward a better life and a better world.  But for ten, for twenty, who so start not two ever come to the top.  ‘Heaven is not next door,’ writes Rutherford to Rusco; ‘if it were we would all be saved.’  There was a well-known kind of Christians in Rutherford’s day that the English Puritans called by the nickname of the Temporaries; and it is to pluck Rusco from among them that Rutherford writes to him this admonitory letter.  And there is an equally well-known type of Christian in our day, though I do not know that any one has so happily nicknamed him as yet.

‘The Scriptures beguiled the Pharisees,’ writes Rutherford; and the Christian I refer to is self-beguiled with the very best things in the Scriptures.  The cross is always in his mouth, but you will never find it on his back.  He has got, at least in language, as far as the cross, but he remains there.  He says the burden is off his back, and he takes care that he shall keep out of that kind of life that would put it on again.  He has been once pardoned, and he takes his stand upon that.  He strove hard till he was converted, and he sometimes strives hard to get other men brought to the same conversion.  But his conversion has been all exhausted in the mere etymology of the act, for he has only turned round in his religious life, he has not made one single step of progress.  But let one of the greatest masters of true religion that ever taught the Church of Christ speak to us on the subject of this gin-horse Christian.  ‘The Scriptures,’ says Jonathan Edwards, ’everywhere represent the seeking, the striving, and the labour of a Christian as being chiefly to be gone through after his conversion, and his conversion as being but the beginning of the work.  And almost all that is said in the New Testament of men’s watching, giving earnest heed to themselves, running the race that is set before them, striving and agonising, pressing forward, reaching forth, crying to God night and day; I say, almost all that is said in the New Testament of these things is spoken of and is directed to God’s saints.  Where these things are applied once to sinners seeking salvation, they are spoken of the saint’s prosecution of their high calling ten times.  But many have got in these days into a strange anti-scriptural way of having all their striving and wrestling over before they are converted, and so having an easy time of it afterwards.’