There is nothing sadder than the strange power which men have of blinking the great facts of their own condition and of human life. I know few things that seem to me more tragic, and certainly none that are more contemptible, than the easy-going, superficial optimism, or the easy-going superficial negligence, with which hosts of people altogether slur over, even if they do not deny, the plain fact that every man and woman of us stands here in this world, though compassed by many blessings, and in the enjoyment of much good, and having many delights flowing into our lives, and being warranted in laughter and mirth,--still stands like an unsheltered fugitive in the open, with a ring of enemies round about that may close in upon him. Self-interest seems often to be blind, and in many, I am sure, of my hearers, it is blind to the plainest and largest truths with reference to themselves, their necessities, and their conditions. Ah, dear friends! after all that we say about the beauty, and the brightness, and the joyfulness of life, and the beneficence of God, we live in a very stern world. There are evils that may come, and there are some that certainly will come. You young people--thank God for it, but do not abuse it--are buoyant in hope, and take short views, and are glad, where older folk who have learned what life is generally have sober estimates of its possibilities, and our radiant visions have toned down into a very subdued grey. Sorrow, disappointment, broken hopes, hopes fulfilled and disappointed--and, that is worst of all--losses, inevitable partings when the giant-shrouded figure of Death forces its way in at the rose-covered portal, in spite of the puny effort of Love to keep it out, sicknesses, failures in business, griefs of many kinds that I cannot touch, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, these lie waiting somewhere on the road for every one of us. Are you going to stand in the unsheltered plain, a mark for all these? Do you think you can front them in your own strength? Are you able, calmly and soberly, remembering the possibilities that lie in the black clouds over your head, to say, Pour on! I will endure?' Nay! I verily; you need a refuge.
You carry your own worst danger buttoned up in your own waistcoats and gowns; you bear about with you in your hearts, in your passions, in your desires, a vase of combustibles amidst the sparks of a volcano, so to speak. And any one of these that fill the air may drop into it, and bring about a conflagration. No man that has measured himself, the irritability of his nerves, the excitability of his passions, the weakness of his will, and its ugly trick of going over to the enemy at the very critical moment of the fight, but, if he is a wise man, will say, I need something stronger than myself to fall back upon, I need some damp cloth or other to be laid over the magazine of combustibles in my heart. I need a refuge from myself.'
You carry--no matter whence it came, or how it was developed; that is of no consequence, you have got it --you carry a conscience that is not altogether silent in any man, I suppose, and that certainly is not altogether dead in you. Its awful voice speaks many a time in the silence of the night, and in the depth of your own heart, and tells you that there are evil things in your past, and a page black in your biography which you can do nothing to cancel or to erase the stains from, or to tear out. What I have written I have written.' And so long as memory holds her place and conscience is not shattered altogether, there needs no other hell to make the punishment of the evildoer. You need a refuge from the stings of the true indictments of your own consciences.
Your conscience is a prophet. It is not, nowadays, fashionable to preach about the Day of Judgment--more's the pity, I think. We say that every one of us shall give an account of ourselves to God. Have you ever tried to believe that about yourself, and to realise what it means? Think that all, down to the cozy depths that we are ashamed to look at ourselves, will be spread out before the pure eyes and perfect judgment of the all-judging' God. O brother! you will need a refuge that you may have boldness before Him in the Day of Judgment.' These things that I have been speaking about, external ills, ungoverned self, the accusations of conscience, which is the voice of God, and that future to which we are all driving as fast as we can--these things are truths. And, being truths, they should enter in, as operative facts, into your lives. My question is, have they done so?
You need a refuge; have you ever calmly contemplated the necessity? Oh! do not let that dogged ignorance of the facts bewitch yon any longer. Do not let the inconsequent levity that cannot see an inch beyond its nose hide from yon the realities of our own condition. People in the prisons, during the September massacres of the French Revolution, used to amuse themselves--although the tumbrils were coming for some of them to-morrow morning, and the headsman was waiting for them--used to amuse themselves as if they were free, and got up entertainments with a ghastly mockery of joy. That is something like what some of us do. One has seen a mule going down an Alpine pass, ambling quite comfortably along, with one foot over a precipice, and a thousand feet to fall if it slips. That is how some of us travel along the road. Sheep will nibble the grass, stretching their stupid necks a little bit further to get an especially succulent tuft on the edge of the cliffs, with eight hundred feet and a crawling sea at the bottom of it to receive them if they stumble. Do not be like that. Be ye not as the horses or the mules that have no understanding,' but look the facts in the face, and do not be content till you have acted as they prescribe.
