2. God is said here to make the temptation as well as the way of escape. Nor is this without a purpose. He knows precisely the strength we need, because He has prepared the
1 F. de W. Luslrington, Sermons to Young Boys, 24.
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occasion on which we shall be called to use it. It will never fail through any miscalculation or ignorance on His part. It will never be too feeble or too long upon the way. We may always be sure His succour will be at hand, a very present help in every time of trouble. Even in those moments in which our temptation comes upon us most suddenly, so that it may seem to have taken even God Himself by surprise, His way of escape will be close beside us. For the swiftest and most unforeseen of temptations are all equally under His control.
If I leave you to call this deceiving spirit what you like — or to theorize about it as you like. All that I desire you to recog- nize is the fact of its being here, and the need of its being fought with. If you take the Bible's account of it, or Dante's, or Milton's, you will receive the image of it as a mighty spiritual creature, commanding others, and resisted by others : if you take iEschylus's or Hesiod's account of it, you will hold it for a partly elementary and unconscious adversity of fate, and partly for a group of monstrous spiritual agencies connected with death, and begotten out of the dust; if you take a modern rationalist's, you will accept it for a mere treachery and want of vitality in our own moral nature exposing it to loathsomeness or moral disease, as the body is capable of mortification or leprosy. I do not care what you call it, — whose history you believe of it, — nor what you yourself can imagine about it; the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us ; and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly reality, I say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real. Unbeliev- able,— those, — unless you had seen them ; no fable could have been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent — working its way sidelong in the sand. As real, but with sting of eternal death — this worm that dies not, and fire that is not quenched, within our souls or around them. Eternal death, I say — sure, that, whatever creed you hold ; — if the old Scriptural one, Death of perpetual banishment from before God's face ; if the modern rationalist one, Death Eternal for us, instant and unredeemable ending of lives wasted in misery.
This is what this unquestionably present — this, according to his power, oram-present — fiend, brings us towards, daily. He is the person to be " voted " against, my working friend ; it is worth something, having a vote against Mm, if you can get it ! Which you can, indeed; but not by gift from Cabinet Ministers; you
298 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
must work warily with your own hands, and drop sweat of heart's blood, before you can record that vote effectually.1
3. The way of escape must be sought for, or it may not be found. It is not always forcibly obtruded. It reveals itself to the humble and watchful eye — the eye that has become single, and waits only upon God. And if we are tempted, and can see no mode of relief, then we must search for it. Gradually it will open and widen before us.
4. How is it that God makes the way of escape ? Notice that it is not a way, but the way of escape ; the one separate escape for each separate temptation.
(1) Sometimes the only victory over a temptation is not to argue with it, not even to wrestle with it, but simply to get away from it. " Brethren, let us not be righteous over-much ! " St. Paul, indeed, uses no grandiloquent speech as to what a man should do when he finds himself beset by temptations. He does not in this place recommend a man to draw his sword, and plant his right foot forward, and clench his teeth, and do many another strenuous and showy thing which looks so well in a picture and sounds so well when addressed to a great audience ; but which is all, as a matter of fact, futile in those hot, and terrible, and lonely hours when we are sorely tempted to do wrong. No ; St. Paul tells us here that when we are tempted, the first and only thing to do is to get away from the spot, to run in fact for our life. This is one of those simple and obvious things which never occur to any of us until a genius arises to say them — when you are hard pressed by evil, move on, get away, escape. That may sound tame. It may sound less than the highest; but it is the very highest. Nay, it is the only truth and fact of the matter. There are situations in life, dark turnings in the moral world, sheer precipices where we must not trust ourselves, where the only sensible and religious course is to get away.