mean, and commonplace things; whereas enlightened, enlarged, and elevated men are exercised after the manner of Robert Bruce, Thomas Halyburton, John Bunyan, and Butler himself.  “The chief temptations of the generality of the world are the ordinary motives to injustice or unrestrained pleasure; but there are other persons without this shallowness of temper; persons of a deeper sense as to what is invisible and future.  Now, these persons have their moral discipline set them in that high region.”  The profound bishop means that while their appetites and their tempers are the stumbling-stones of the most of men, the difficult problems of natural and revealed and experimental religion are the test and the triumph of other men.  As we have just seen in the men mentioned above.  Students, whose temptations lie fully as much in their intellects as in their senses, should buy (for a few pence) Halyburton’s Memoirs.  “With Halyburton,” says Dr. John Duncan, “I feel great intellectual congruity.  Halyburton was naturally a sceptic, but God gave that sceptic great faith.”

Then again, what Atheist calls the “tediousness” of the journey has undoubtedly a great hand in making some half-in-earnest men sceptics, if not scoffers.  Many of us here to-night who can never now take this miserable man’s way out of the tedium of the Christian life, yet most bitterly feel it.  Whether that tedium is inherent in that life, and inevitable to such men as we are who are attempting that life; how far that feature belongs to the very essence of the pilgrim life, and how far we import our own tedium into the pilgrimage; the fact remains as Atheist puts it.  As Atheist in this book says, so the Atheist who is in our hearts often says:  We are like to have nothing for all our pains but a lifetime of tedious travel.  Yes, wherever the blame lies, there can be no doubt about it, that what this hilarious scoffer calls the tediousness of the way is but a too common experience among many of those who, tediousness and all, will still cleave fast to it and will never leave it.

Then, again, great trials in life, great straits, dark and too-long-continued providences, prayer unanswered, or not yet answered in the way we dictate, bad men and bad causes growing like a green bay tree, and good men and good work languishing and dying; these things, and many more things such as these, of which this world of faith and patience is full, prove quite too much for some men till they give themselves up to a state of mind that is nothing better than atheism.  “My evidences and my certainty,” says Halyburton, “were not answerable to the weight I was compelled to lay upon them.”  A figure which Goodwin in his own tender and graphic way takes up thus:  “Set pins in a wall and fix them in ever so loosely, yet, if you hang nothing upon them they will seem to stand firm; but hang a heavy weight upon them, or even give them the least jog as you pass, and the whole thing will suddenly come down.  The wall is God’s word, the slack pin is our faith, and the weight and the jog are the heavy burdens and the sudden shocks of life, and down our hearts go, wall and pin and suspended vessel and all.”