hat were made up in the daylight or in the
darkness by your own hands in your early days? Were you early or were
you too late in your conversion? Or are you truly converted to God and
to salvation even yet? And are you at this moment still binding a burden
on your back that you shall never lay down on this side your grave--it
may be, not on this side your burning bed in hell? Ask yourselves all
that before God and before your own conscience, and make yourselves
absolutely sure that God at any rate is not mocked; and, therefore that
you, too, shall in the end reap exactly as you from the beginning have
sown. "How camest thou by thy burden at first?" asked Mr.
Worldly-Wiseman at the trembling pilgrim. "By reading this book in my
hand," he answered. And, in the long run, it is always the Bible that
best creates a sinner's burden, binds it on his back, and makes it so
terribly heavy to bear. Fear of death and judgment will sometimes make
up and bind on a sinner's burden; and sometimes the fear of man's
judgment on this side of death will do it. Fear of being found out in
some cases will make a man's secret sin far too heavy for him to bear.
The throne of public opinion is not a very white throne; at the same
time, it is a coarse forecast and a rough foretaste of the last judgment;
and the fear of it not seldom makes a man's burden simply intolerable to
him. Sometimes a great sinner's burden leads him to flight and outlawry;
sometimes to madness and self-murder; and sometimes, by the timeous and
sufficient grace of God, to the way of escape that our pilgrim took.
Tenderness of conscience, also, simple softness of heart and conscience,
will sometimes make a terrible burden out of what other men would call a
very light matter. Bind a burden on that iron pillar standing there, and
it will feel nothing and say nothing. But, bind the same burden on that
man in whose seat that dead pillar takes up a sitter's room, and he will
make all that are in the house hear his sighs and his groans. And lay an
act of sin--an evil word or evil work or evil thought--on one man among
us, and he will walk about the streets with as erect a head and as
smiling a countenance and as light a step as if he were an innocent
child; while, lay half as much on his neighbour, and it will so bruise
him to the earth that all men will take knowledge of him that he is a
miserable man. Our Lord could no doubt have carried His cross from the
hall of ju