The Hard Way

Is not the way of transgressors pleasant in its progress, though it ends in death?  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 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 a naked man; but such was his will , or the will of the spirit that possessed him. It was 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 they have not known."
       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 on 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 here even 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.  W. Arnot