The Hard Way

“The way of transgressors is hard.” — xiiL 15.

not the way of transgressors pleasant in its progress, though it ends in death 1 No. Sin barters away future safety, but does not secure present peace in return. Things are not always as they seem to be. The pleasures of sin are not only limited in their duration, they are lies even while they last. They are “for a season” as to endurance, and for a show as to their character. There is a bitterness in the transgressor’s heart, which only that heart can know. The man in the gospel history, who wore no clothes, and lived among the tombs, did not lead a happy life. The rocky, thorny graveyard was a hard bed, and the dewy night air a cold covering for the naked man; but such was his will, or the will of the spirit that possessed him. It was the man’s pleasure to take that way, but the way was hard. It is so still, and ever will be, for all whom the same spirit leads. It has neither the promise of the life that now is, nor of that which is to come. The race is torture, and the goal perdition. “Destruction and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace have they not known.”

Here is a glory of God reflected from the experience of men. It is far-seeing mercy that makes the way of transgressors hard; its hardness warns the traveller to turn that he may live. Two mechanics work side by side all day, and receive equal wages at night. One goes home when his toil is over, and rests in the bosom of his own family, enjoying doubly all that he has won, because he shares it with those who love him there: the other having no home to love, or no love to home, goes into a public-house, and remains there as long as his money lasts. Late at night he is driven to the street, penniless, hungry, and without a friend. He falls at every turn. His clothes are besmeared with inud; his bones are bruised; his face streams with blood. In pity for his misery, rather than in vengeance for his crime, the officers of justice drag or carry him to a prison cell, and lay him on its floor till morning. The man followed the way of transgressors, and he has found it hard. Day by day his body is bruised and torn on the rugged sides of that crooked path; and yet he will not forsake it. If any one inquire after the name of this foul spirit, we answer, His name is Legion, for they are many.

Nor is this the only crooked path that tears the feet of the wretched passenger: they are all hard, however widely they diverge frinn each other — all that diverge from the line of righteousness. In some of them, the hardness is an iron that entereth into the soul, rather than the body, and therefore the wounds are not so palpable to others. The pain is not on that account, however, less pungent to the sufferer: “A wounded spirit, who can bear “?”

But the right way is not a soft and silky path for the foot of man to tread upon; and, if one thing happens to all in the journey of life, what advantage have the good] Much every way, and specifically thus: The hardness which disciples experience in following the Lord, is righteousness rubbing on their remaining lusts, and so wasting their deformities away; whereas the hardness of a transgressor’s way is the carnal mind, in its impotent enmity, dashing itself against the bosses of the Almighty’s buckler. The one is a strainer, made strait to purge the impurities away, through which the purified emerges into peace; the other is the vengeance which belongeth unto God, beginning even here to repay. The stroke of discipline under which a pilgrim smarts, as he travels towards Zion, is an excellent oil which will not break his head: the collision between transgressors and the law of God, hardens the impenitent for completer destruction at the final fall. As the pains of cure differ from the pains of killing, so differs the salutary straitness which presses the entrants at the gate of life, from the hardness which hurts transgressors while they flee from God.

Cljoia 0f Companions.