Appeal to D. M. Canright
151
apostasy? There has ever been with you a desire to do a large work.
Had you been content to do your small work with thoroughness and
fidelity, this would meet the approval of the Master. But remember, it
would take the work of a lifetime to recover what a moment of yielding
to temptation and thoughtlessness throws away.
We are traveling, strangers and pilgrims, traveling to a better coun-
try; but it would be better for you and me to be beasts of burden to plow
the field rather than to be in heaven without a heart to sympathize with
its inhabitants. By a momentary act of will you may place yourself in
the power of Satan, but it will require more than a momentary act of
will to break his fetters and reach for a higher, holier life. The purpose
may be formed, the work begun, but its accomplishment will require
toil, time, and perseverance, patience and sacrifice. The man who
deliberately wanders from God in the full blaze of light will find, when
he wishes to set his face to return, that briers and thorns have grown
up in his path, and he must not be surprised or discouraged if he is
compelled to travel long with torn and bleeding feet. The most fearful
and most to be dreaded evidence of man’s fall from a better state is the
fact that it costs so much to get back. The way of return can be gained
only by hard fighting, inch by inch, every hour.
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Heaven’s path is too narrow for rank and riches to ride in state, too
narrow for the play of ambition, too steep and rugged for carriages of
ease to climb. Toil, patience, self- sacrifice, reproach, poverty, hard
work, enduring the contradiction of sinners against Himself, was the
portion of Christ, and it must be the portion of man if he ever enters
the Paradise of God.
If your present faith is yielded so easily, it is because you never
sent down the taproot in clinging faith. It has cost you too little. If it
does not sustain you in trial and comfort you in affliction, it is because
your faith has not been made strong by effort and pure by sacrifice.
Those who are willing to suffer for Christ will experience more joy
in suffering than in the fact that Christ has suffered for them, thus
showing that He loved them. Those who win heaven will put forth
their noblest efforts, and will labor with all long-suffering, that they
may reap the fruit of toil.
There is a hand that will open wide the gates of Paradise to those
that have stood the test of temptation and kept a good conscience by
giving up the world, its honors, its applause, for the love of Christ,