And yet, as we all know, it is possible to do this, making the prayer mere lip service, under the influence of daily custom. This, then, is the question it suggests to us whenever we stop to think about it: How far are we endeavouring to keep our lives in accordance with the spirit of such a petition? "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Most of you, I can well believe, would not voluntarily or deliberately step out of your way to meet a temptation, or to seek any evil course of life. You would not do it of your own free choice, or in cold blood, as we say. This, at any rate, is your own feeling about sin, whether the feeling is consistent with your life or not. As you contemplate any low form of life in another, you recognise its ugliness and its degrading character, and you call it very likely by the name it deserves. If, then, you find yourself involved in any sin, in spite of these feelings, and although you take this daily prayer upon your lips, how comes it to be so? How comes it that you remain in this pitiable condition? Your answer is, perhaps, that temptation comes upon you unawares, and that it takes you by surprise; or it seems to watch for some moment of forgetfulness or weakness; or you fight against a temptation, but still it clings to you as if it had a life of its own and were independent of you; or you are drawn into sin you scarcely know how; or you are driven into it by some one whom you fear although you despise him; or it seems to you to be in the very air you breathe. And although such answers explanatory of a life of sin or waste are no real excuse for it, they are very often quite true. If it were not so, the devil would not be the dangerous enemy that he assuredly is to our spiritual life; our risk of failure in our battle with sin would not be so great as experience shows it to be. We must therefore expect that temptations to sin will sometimes come upon us quite by surprise and at unlocked for moments, and that some temptations will linger and cling to us with a hateful persistence; you must be prepared also to find that some companion may draw you towards a sin, or a bully may endeavour to drive you into it. Your life is a happy one if it is free from all such risks, but you cannot count upon such freedom. So that, if any one begins his life thinking that his conflict with evil and its manifold temptations is going to be an easy one, he begins under a dangerous delusion, and he is likely to end in some disastrous failure.