erhaps pitilessly fought down in the
first instance--asserted its power--its power for evil. Not to love was
not to live. He was dead while he lived. He could not find peace in an
invisible world of which he did not see any more even a shadow round
about him. _Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light?
even very dark, and no brightness in it?_ He did not believe that. What
miserable scruples to torment, blind, and pollute the soul! Pascal has
written that there are thousands who sin without regret, who sin with
gladness, who feel no warning and no interior desire not to sin. They
doubted, hated, loved, acted, felt, and thought just as they pleased.
Perhaps they were not happy, but if they received the punishment of
wrong-doing, the wrong at least was committed out of fetters and
joyously. It is not until men find themselves assailed by a strong wish
that they perceive how very still and very small, all but inaudible, the
still, small voice can be. A moment comes when one ceases to think--one
wills, and if one is able and the will is sufficiently determined, the
purpose is carried into effect. Temptations to steal, to lie, to
deceive, to gamble, to excess in drink and the like cannot approach a
certain order of mind. But the craving for knowledge and a fuller
life--either in a spiritual or the human way--is implanted ineradicably
in every soul, and while it may rest inert and seem nullified in a kind
of apathy, the craving is there--to be aroused surely enough at some
dangerous hour. And of all the dangerous hours in life, the hour of
disappointed love is the most critical. Calm spectators of mortal folly
who have been satisfactorily married for twenty years and more, who have
sons to provide for and daughters to establish, cherish a disdain of
love-stories and boast that they have no patience with morbidity.
Love--which put them into being and keeps the earth in existence--seems
to all such a silly malady peculiar to the sentimental in early youth.
So they put the First Cause--in one of its many manifestations--in the
waste-paper basket, asking each other what will become of Charles if he
cannot find a rich wife, and poor Alice, if she cannot entrap a suitable
husband. But there are others who look on life with some hope of
understanding it truly, in part, at any rate, and these know, perhaps by
experience, perhaps by sympathy, that whereas bodily disturbances may
pass away leaving little or no effect upon t