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Evil, in every form or stage, is dangerous. But if one comes out of these evils, and lapses back into them, the dangers are increased. This is well understood in disease. When the fever has subsided, and pulse and temperature have become normal, if then, through some indiscretion or exposure, the disease returns, the physician looks for a wider variation of pulse and temperature, and greater danger. The forces of nature are weakened; the house of the body was swept clean of all those gracious energies that filled it full of life and health, and now the disease runs riot through all its undefended chambers and passages. So one may dwell in a marsh at the foot of a mountain — a miserable existence, it may be, in malarious damps and under fatal shades; but it is better to stay there than to climb the mountain and heedlessly slip over a precipice. Life may be maintained below, though under wretched conditions; but the fall may cripple or end it. So one may live a contented life in rude poverty; the single room of the hut, water from the spring, the wild forest around, the homespun suit, the plain diet, the unhelped toil, the dull and narrow routine — a picture for pity, perhaps, and not representing the best forms of life; but if one escapes it, and comes into finer and larger ways of living, and then is driven back to the old place and ways, the lapse breeds a discontent and misery before unknown. To venture forth and then return; to rise and fall back; to promise and not fulfil; to undertake and not do — this is the tragedy of character.

I. ONE WHO LAPSES FROM RELIGIOUS EARNESTNESS DOES NOT EASILY REGAIN IT; and if the lapses are frequent there is danger of losing it altogether. The Divine flame cannot often go out and be re-kindled. Once out, it is apt to stay out. The religious nature cannot be tampered with, and retain its integrity. It is largely made up of emotions and passions that lose their quality, and turn into scourges, if treated fitfully. You may bend a bar of iron, and straighten it again; but after repeating this process a few times it suddenly parts in your hands, and only fusing fire can weld it. Take a finer passion — love. You cannot give and take back love without ceasing to love; it is, by its nature, a continuous thing. Violate its nature as such, and it becomes a name and a disgust. One cannot "fall in love" many times, and have a heart left... Fire always burns; water seeks its level; the crystal keeps its angle; light extinguishes darkness. So in spiritual matters; we cannot trifle with these great passions of love and reverence, devotion, fidelity and enthusiasm without destroying them... It is dangerous, because self-destructive to say, "I will do a thing," and then not do it; to take a place of responsibility, and shirk its duties when they begin to press hard and grow monotonous. If we trifle with truth and duty, we do not merely lose them; we change them into avenging spirits that return to us with consuming power.

II. One who takes up and lays off a duty, and is fitful in religious habits and feelings, GROWS SCEPTICAL OF THE REALITY OF THESE THINGS. A religious life gets its vindication and comes to a full proof of its reality, only as it is continuous and lived out to the full. One cannot in a year test the full power of a single Christian quality. A personal vindication of the faith is a life-work, and requires all its years. Thus only does one come to know in whom and what one believes. But if the test is a short or vacillating one; if you try prayer, worship, self-denial, meekness, charity, forgiveness, self-control, devotion for a while, and lapse out of them, you doubt their reality. Why should you not? They bore you no fruit, gave you no proof. But alas for him who reaches such a conclusion by such a process. It is something to believe in goodness, though we may not be good; to believe that honest men walk the streets, though we may not be honest; that the light which shines from the downcast eves of modesty is not a false light, though it may have died out in our own; that when men speak of prayer and faith, they speak of realities and powers, though we may be strangers to them. But to doubt them, to disbelieve their existence — that is perdition. Then the soul begins to depart from all things, the glory of humanity fades Out; inspiration ceases to play within us; nobility is gone out of all our life.

III. THE REASONS FOR STEDFASTNESS. Only one true goal of human effort — character. To know its conditions and obey them is the sum of all knowledge and duty. Regularity, bending the powers to one end, doing always the right thing under the right motive — it is thus that character takes shape and becomes a reality. A habit of religious thought may be formed as truly as a trade can be learned, and under the same law of repetition, guided by will and sympathetic purpose. Lapse, alternations, fluctuations, now earnest, now slothful, now up and doing, and now doing nothing, now alive with religious enthusiasm, now sunk down in apathy — such a history is the defeat and the denial of character. There is still hope no doubt, for one who has had such a history; but he must take care not to repeat it. Character is justly adjudged by its faults and vices, rather than from its virtues; just as it is the weakest spot in the iron that measures the strength of the bar, and just as the rope will hold only the weight that the frayed and chafed strands can endure. In character, the vice blackens the virtue; the virtue cannot whiten the vice... And so, when we turn to the Bible, we find all the promises and all the rewards poured out on those who are faithful unto the end. The patience of the saints is the burden of its exhortation. Be thou faithful unto death, and thou shalt win the crown of life. And in keeping with this, the picture of heavenly perfection, is that of constancy — serving God day and night in His temple; and so they reign for ever and ever.

(T. T. Munger.)

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KJV: When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.

WEB: But the unclean spirit, when he is gone out of the man, passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and doesn't find it.