Denunciatory preachers
seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in
evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a
moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the
inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that
sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with
strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials
of the dead.
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import,
forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness,
importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand;
books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console;
books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that
game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-
back not least. But the average sermon flees the point,
disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and
need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and
momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.
*
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself
dying will get cold comfort from the very youthful view
expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to
help, some to love, some to correct; it may be some to
punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's
son and a second woman's husband, and a third woman's
father.
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