Iniquity _at my heels_. Temptation is very often indirect. It is compact of wiles and subtleties and stratagems. It is adept at taking cover. It does not make a frontal attack unless the obvious state of the soul's defences justifies such a method of attempting a conquest. The stronger a man is, the more subtle and difficult are the ways of sin, as it seeks to enter and to master his life. There are many temptations that never face us, and never give us a chance of facing them. They follow us. We can hear their light footfall and their soft whisperings, but the moment we turn round upon them they vanish. If they disappeared for good, they would be the easiest to deal with of all the ill things that beset our lives. But they do not. The moment we relax our bold, stern search for the face of the enemy, there the evil thing is again--the light footfall and the soft voice. It is terrible work fighting a suggestion. There are the thoughts that a man will not cherish and cannot slay. They may never enter the programme of his life, but there they are, haunting him, waiting, so to speak, at the back of his brain, till he gets used to them. When he seeks to grapple with these enemies his hands close on emptiness. One straight blow, one decisive denial, one stern rebuke, one defiant confession of faith will not suffice for these things. They compass a man's heels. He cannot trample them down. The fashion of the evils that compass us determines the form of the fight we wage with them. Preparations that might amply suffice the city in the day when an army with banners comes against it are no good at all if a plague has to be fought. So there is a way we have to take with 'the iniquity at our heels.' It calls for much patience and much prayer. If we cannot prevent sin from following us, we can at least prevent ourselves from turning and following it. A man can always choose his path if he cannot at every moment determine his company. And as a man goes onward and upward steadfastly toward the City of Light, the evil things fall off and drop behind, and God shall bring him where no evil thing dare follow, and where no ravenous beast shall stalk its prey. The battle with sin is not an incident in the Christian life; it is the abiding condition of it. While there are some temptations that we have to slay, there are others we have to outgrow. They are overcome, not by any one supreme assertion of the will, but by the patient cultivation of all the loftiest and most wholesome and delicate and intensely spiritual modes of feeling and of being.