.

"The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." How great is the
loving-kindness of these words,--how gently does Christ bear with the
weakness of his disciples! But this thought may be the most blessed or
the most dangerous thought in the world; the most blessed if it touches
us with love, the most dangerous if it emboldens us in sin. He is full
of loving-kindness, full of long-suffering; for days, and weeks, and
months, and years he bears with us: we grieve him, and he entreats; we
crucify him afresh, yet he will not come down from the cross in power
and majesty; he endures and spares. So it is for days, and months, and
years; for some years it may be to most of us,--for many years to some
of the youngest. There may be some here who may go on grieving Christ,
and crucifying him afresh, for as much as seventy years; and he will
bear with them all that time, and his sun will daily shine upon them,
and his creatures and his word will minister to their pleasure; and he
himself will say nothing to them but to entreat them to turn and be
saved. This may last, I say, to some amongst us for seventy years; to
others it may last fifty; to many of us it may last for forty, or for
thirty; none of us, perhaps, are so old but that it may last with us
twenty, or at the least ten. Such is the prospect before us, if we like
it: not to be depended upon with certainty, it is true, but yet to be
regarded as probable. But as these ten, or twenty, or fifty, or seventy
years pass on, Christ will still spare us, but his voice of entreaty
will be less often heard; the distance between him and us will be
consciously wider. From one place after another where we once used
sometimes to see him, he will have departed; year after year some object
which used once to catch the light from heaven, will have become
overgrown, and will lie constantly in gloom; year after year the world
will become to us more entirely devoid of God. If sorrow, or some
softening joy ever turns our minds towards Christ, we shall be startled
at perceiving there is something which keeps us from him, that we cannot
earnestly believe in him; that if we speak of loving him, our hearts,
which can still love earthly things, feel that the words are but
mockery. Alas, alas! the increased weakness of our flesh, has destroyed
all the power of our spirit, and almost all its willingness: it is bound
with chains which it cannot break, and, indeed, scarcely desires to
break. Red