you, into being a Christian?  What burdens do you carry on your broken back to this day that were made up in the daylight or in the darkness by your own hands in your early days?  Were you early or were you too late in your conversion?  Or are you truly converted to God and to salvation even yet?  And are you at this moment still binding a burden on your back that you shall never lay down on this side your grave—­it may be, not on this side your burning bed in hell?  Ask yourselves all that before God and before your own conscience, and make yourselves absolutely sure that God at any rate is not mocked; and, therefore that you, too, shall in the end reap exactly as you from the beginning have sown.  “How camest thou by thy burden at first?” asked Mr. Worldly-Wiseman at the trembling pilgrim.  “By reading this book in my hand,” he answered.  And, in the long run, it is always the Bible that best creates a sinner’s burden, binds it on his back, and makes it so terribly heavy to bear.  Fear of death and judgment will sometimes make up and bind on a sinner’s burden; and sometimes the fear of man’s judgment on this side of death will do it.  Fear of being found out in some cases will make a man’s secret sin far too heavy for him to bear.  The throne of public opinion is not a very white throne; at the same time, it is a coarse forecast and a rough foretaste of the last judgment; and the fear of it not seldom makes a man’s burden simply intolerable to him.  Sometimes a great sinner’s burden leads him to flight and outlawry; sometimes to madness and self-murder; and sometimes, by the timeous and sufficient grace of God, to the way of escape that our pilgrim took.  Tenderness of conscience, also, simple softness of heart and conscience, will sometimes make a terrible burden out of what other men would call a very light matter.  Bind a burden on that iron pillar standing there, and it will feel nothing and say nothing.  But, bind the same burden on that man in whose seat that dead pillar takes up a sitter’s room, and he will make all that are in the house hear his sighs and his groans.  And lay an act of sin—­an evil word or evil work or evil thought—­on one man among us, and he will walk about the streets with as erect a head and as smiling a countenance and as light a step as if he were an innocent child; while, lay half as much on his neighbour, and it will so bruise him to the earth that all men will take knowledge of him that he is a miserable man.  Our Lord could no doubt have carried His cross from the hall of judgment to the hill-top without help had His back not been wet with blood.  What with a whole and an unwealed body, a well-rested and well-nourished body, He could easily have carried, with His broken body and broken heart He quite sank under.  And so it is with His people.  One of His heart-broken, heart-bleeding people will sink down to death and hell under a burden of sin and corruption that another of them will scarcely