the
heart which you cannot quench: but which if they remained there
would surely destroy you. So intolerable are they, that you feel
that you will actually and really die, in some strange unspeakable
way, if you continue in that temper long. Do not there open at such
times within our hearts black depths of evil, a power of becoming
wicked, a chance of being swept off into sin if one gives way, which
one never suspected till then; and yet with all these, the most
dreadful sense of helplessness, of slavery, of despair?--God grant
that may not remain, for then comes the mad hope to escape death by
death, to try by one desperate stroke to rid oneself of that self
which is for the time one's torment, worm, fire, death, and hell.
And what is this dark fight within us? What does the Bible call it?
It is death and life, eternal death and eternal life, salvation and
damnation, hell and heaven, fighting together within our hapless
hearts, to see which shall be our masters. It is the battle of the
evil spirit, who is the Devil, fighting with the good spirit, who is
God. Nothing less than that, my friends. Yes, in those hateful and
shameful moments of pride, or spite, or contempt, or self-will, or
suspicion, or sneering, on which when they are past we look back
with shame and horror, and wonder how we could have been such
wretches even for a moment,--at such times, I say, our heart is a
battle-field, on which no less than the Devil himself, and God
Himself are fighting for our souls. On one side, Satan trying to
bring us into that state of eternal death in which he lives himself;
Satan, the loveless one, the self-willed one, the accuser, the
slanderer, slandering God to us, slandering man to us, slandering to
us the friends we love best and trust most utterly; yea, slandering
our own selves to us, trying to make us believe that we are as bad,
ought to be as bad, and must always be as bad as we seem for the
time to be; that we cannot shake off our evil passions, that we
cannot rise again out of the eternal death of sin into the eternal
life of righteousness. And on the other side, the Spirit of God and
of His Christ, the Spirit of eternal life, the Spirit of justice,
and righteousness, love, joy, peace, duty, self-sacrifice, trying to
make us know Him and see His beauty, and obey Him, and be at peace;
trying to raise us again into that eternal life and state of
salvation which the Lord Jesus Christ has bought for us with Hi