parents’ door, or at your minister’s, or, if their hands are clean, then at your own.  Christ has made it plain to a proverb, and John Bunyan has made it a nursery and a schoolboy story, that the way to heaven is steep and narrow and lonely and perilous.  And that, remember, not a few of the first miles of the way, but all the way, and even through the dark valley itself.  ’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, fighting, putting on the whole armour of God, pressing forward, reaching forth, crying to God day and night; I say, almost all that we have in the New Testament on these subjects is spoken and directed to the saints.  Where those things are applied to sinners seeking salvation once, they are spoken of the saints’ prosecution of their salvation ten times’ (Jonathan Edwards).  If you have a life at all like that, you will be sorely tempted to think that such suffering and struggle, increasing rather than diminishing as life goes on, is a sign that you are so bad as not to be a true Christian at all.  You will be tempted to think and say so.  But all the time the truth is, that he who has not that labouring, striving, agonising, fearing, and trembling in himself, knows nothing at all about the religion of Christ and the way to heaven; and if he thinks he does, then that but proves him a hypocrite, a self-deceived, self-satisfied hypocrite; there is not an ounce of a true Christian in him.  Says Samuel Rutherford on this matter:  ’Christ commandeth His hearers to a strict and narrow way, in mortifying heart-lusts, in loving our enemy, in feeding him when he is hungry, in suffering for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s, in bearing His cross, in denying ourselves, in becoming humble as children, in being to all men and at all times meek and lowly in heart.’  Let any man lay all that intelligently and imaginatively alongside of his own daily life.  Let him name some such heart-lust.  Let him name also some enemy, and ask himself what it is to love that man, and to feed him in his hunger; what it is in which he is called to suffer for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s, in his reputation, in his property, in his business, in his feelings.  Let him put his finger on something in which he is every day to deny himself, and to be humble and teachable, and to keep himself out of sight like a little child; and if that man does not find out how narrow and heart-searching the way to heaven is, he will be the first who has so found his way thither.  No, no; be not deceived.  Deceive not yourself, and let no man deceive you.  God is not mocked, neither are His true saints.  ’Would to God I were back in my pulpit but for one Sabbath,’ said a dying minister in Aberdeen.  ’What would you do?’ asked a brother minister at his bedside.  ’I would preach to the people the difficulty of salvation,’ he said.  All which things are told, not for