nly our Lord means
that the force must not be done to the gates or the walls of heaven, but
to our own hard hearts and evil lives. 'I find it hard to be a
Christian,' writes Rutherford to Rusco. 'There is no little thrusting
and thringing to get in at heaven's gates. Heaven is a strong castle
that has to be taken by force.' 'Oh to have one day more in my pulpit in
Aberdeen!' cried a great preacher of that day when he was dying. 'What
would you do?' asked another minister who sat at his bedside. 'I would
preach to the people the difficulty of salvation,' said the dying man.
'Remember,' wrote Rutherford to Rusco from the same city, 'Remember that
it is violent sweating and striving that alone taketh heaven.'

3. Remember also that there are many who start well at the bottom of the
hill who never get to the top. We ministers and elders know that only
too well; we do not need to be reminded of that. There are the names of
scores and scores of young communicants on our session books of whom we
well remember how we boasted about them when they took the foot of the
hill, but we never mention their names now, or only with a blush and in a
whisper. Some take to the hill-foot at one age, and some at another;
some for one reason and some for another. A bereavement awakens one, a
sickness--their own or that of some one dear to them--another; a
disappointment in love or in business will sometimes do it; a fall into
sin will also do it; a good book, a good sermon, a conversation with a
friend who has been some way up the hill; many things may be made use of
to make men and women, and young men and women, take a start toward a
better life and a better world. But for ten, for twenty, who so start
not two ever come to the top. 'Heaven is not next door,' writes
Rutherford to Rusco; 'if it were we would all be saved.' There was a
well-known kind of Christians in Rutherford's day that the English
Puritans called by the nickname of the Temporaries; and it is to pluck
Rusco from among them that Rutherford writes to him this admonitory
letter. And there is an equally well-known type of Christian in our day,
though I do not know that any one has so happily nicknamed him as yet.

'The Scriptures beguiled the Pharisees,' writes Rutherford; and the
Christian I refer to is self-beguiled with the very best things in the
Scriptures. The cross is always in his mouth, but you will never find it
on his back. He has got, at least in lan