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On the Narrow Ledge

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Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, Cal. · Feb 6, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 6.

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On the Narrow Ledge

By W. B. Gray

A COMPANY of hunters were eating their lunch up in the Scotch Highlands when one of them spied, on the face of a great precipice opposite, a sheep on a narrow ledge of rock. He pointed it out to the rest, and one of the guides explained that the sheep had been tempted by the sight of green grass to jump down to some ledge a foot or two from the top of the cliff. Soon, having eaten all the grass there, and unable to get back, there was nothing else for it to do but scramble down to some lower ledge. It would finish what might be there, and would have to jump to some ledge yet lower.
“Now it has got to the last,” said he, looking through the field-glass and seeing that below it was the steep cliff without a break for two hundred feet.
“What will happen to it now?” asked the others, eagerly. “O, now it will be lost! The eagles will see it and swoop down upon it, and, maddened with fright and hunger, it will leap over the cliff and be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.”
Is it not just like that that a soul goes astray? A man is tempted to partake of the pleasures that are on the ledge just a little lower than the high table-land of moral life on which he has lived. Do some of you not know what it means? It is only a little way down, so you think, to that show of pleasure or seeming gain, attractive as the show of green grass was to the sheep. You expected to go right back, but it is easier to go down to the next ledge than it is to get back, and so down you go, like King Saul, and like the lost sheep. Time passes away, and your heart becomes harder and more indifferent than you had thought possible.
Do not despair, even tho you are on the last ledge. The Good Shepherd is hunting for you. He has left the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and has come out over the bleak mountains of sin seeking for you. If you will heed His voice, He will lift you again to the highlands of peace and joy.—W. B. Gray.