They had just gone a little farther wrong than we had
as yet gone,--just a very little farther; in some cases, indeed, not so
far, when they fell and were dashed to pieces with their fall. It was
well for us at that dreadful moment that we heard the same voice saying
to us for our encouragement as said to the two trembling transgressors:
'Let thine heart be toward the highway, even the way that thou wentest;
turn again.' Now, what is it in which you are at this moment going off
the right road? What is that life of disobedience or self-indulgence
that you are just entering on? Keep your ears open and you will hear
hundreds of men and women falling and being dashed to pieces before you
and all around you. Are you falling of late too much under the power of
your bodily appetites? It is not one man, nor two, well known to you,
who have fallen never to rise again out of that horrible pit. Are you
well enough aware that you are being led into bad company? Or, is your
companion, who is not a bad man in anything else, leading you, in this
and in that, into what at any rate is bad for you? You will soon, unless
you cut off your companion like a right hand, be found saying with
misguided and overruled Hopeful: Oh that I had kept me to my right way!
And so on in all manner of sin and trespass.
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