THE BORDER TERRITORY. 157 becoming more and more dissatisfied with such things. I have no enjoyment in them. A flash of another world will sometimes strike upon me in the midst of the gay dissipation, and my thoughts go off a-moralising." And yet that was the man who had previously prayed, "O that my eyes were opened that I were born again into a new world of vision!" That was the man who had exclaimed with earnestness, as if his heart were speaking, "O Lord, look on me in mercy! Remove the source of my depravity, change my heart, give me a right spirit; and then at last the desert shall blossom as the rose. ."" In other words, he sought to retain this world, while preparing for the next. He thus retarded the period of his conversion. He tried to give the one hand to God and the other to frivolity; and, in doing so, exemplified that resistless tendency which rules in man, to seek that in the creature, which can be found only in God that in the phantoms or the shadows of an hour, which can be secured only by securing the fulness of joy, the pleasures which are for evermore-that, in brief, in hardening the heart against the beseeching voice of God, which can be found only in applying the heart to wisdom as that voice directs. But we need not further illustrate this point. The tendency to discover some border territory, where the old man may be spared a little, is epidemic, and perhaps all who have made the transition from death in sin, to life in holiness, have attempted, for a season, to reconcile the interests of time and folly with those of eternity and wisdom. But a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways; and his ever multiplying disappointments may well warn us not to walk in his footsteps. The world is sufficiently decided in its pursuits; why should the believer falter in his? The prince of the power of the air has willing vassals; why should the Lord of life be served with half a heart? Deathbeds put to flight for ever all that the world pursues as pleasure; why not substitute for it at once the pleasures which endure for evermore? "My son, give me thine heart"—"What thy L 158 THE WORK OF WISDOM. hands find to do, do it with all thy might"-"Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling"-these are Scriptures which at once summon us to decision, and indicate its intensity. He that is wise will act upon the warning. CHAPTER XIV. The Young Convert—Bis Experience. "My mind was so turned, that it lay, like a horse-leech at the vein, still crying out, 'Give, give,' so fixed upon eternity, and the things about the kingdom of heaven. . . . . that neither pleasures, nor profits, nor persuasions, nor threats could make it let go its hold; and though I speak it with shame, yet it is a certain truth, it would then have been as difficult for me to have taken my mind from heaven to earth, as I have found it often since to get it again from earth to heaven."-JOHN BUNYAN. The Young Convert-Bis Experience. Mistakes-Narrow views of young Christians-The reason-An exampleRev. Henry Watson Fox-Winning souls to Christ-The scrupulous Christian-His perplexities and deliverance. THE first dawning perception of the way of salvation— the first moment at which the love of God in Christ is felt in the soul-sometimes produces a joy which enables us to know by foretaste the blessedness of the redeemed spirit when it shall awake from the dream of this life to the realities and the ecstasies of the life to come. The vividness with which the things of the Spirit are then sometimes presented to the soul, and the freshness of the whole scheme of redemption, emerging as it now does from darkness into light, bring enjoyments to the young convert, which enable him to understand better, perhaps, than he can do at some more advanced stages of his journey, what the fulness of joy, the pleasures which are for evermore, shall be. Yet there is often mixed up with these joys much that is crude and imperfect; for the blessedness which some young believers feel, is often based upon inexperience or ignorance, rather than accurate knowledge. The zeal of young converts has passed into a proverb, but the same distinction is not bestowed on their knowledge. Let us glance, then, at some of the peculiarities which may be observed in the souls of men, when just awakening from the stupor of nature. The young Christian may be a hoary-headed man, as well as a little |