se, revoke the curse, let
the sunlight of Eden shine once more on a holy, peaceful, and happy
world! This is the great burden of human literature in all its deeper
and more sacred utterances; it is the meaning of all the world's great
poems, the refrain of all its immortal hymns. Recall the curse! let life
again become pure, peaceful, and blessed! Men, nations, ages have
agonized, over the sentence; but they have found no place of repentance,
no means to change the mind of the Judge or their own condition as the
subjects of it, though they have sought it carefully with tears. Esau
was the rejected of the birthright; you and I are the rejected of Eden.
Sinners we are by nature and proclivity, with a sinner's burdens, a
sinner's experience, and a sinner's doom. And there is no way to change
the past, to rid us of the burden, to cancel the sentence, to mitigate
the anguish of a life on which the devil has seared the shameful brand;
no way to force the barred gates of paradise, even by the banded
energies of a pain-racked, sin-tormented world.

And I suppose that the private experience of most men furnishes the key
to this. Who has not known something of the agony with which one dark
deed of passion, lust, falsehood, knavery, baseness, can torture a human
heart? Look back. Is there nothing in the past, rising up at this moment
in the full menace of its hateful form, clear as the ghost of Banquo
before his murderer's sight, which you would give your wealth, nay, some
of you would give worlds if they had them, to undo; if conscience might
but recover its serenity, and life its brightness; if the leprous flesh
of their experience might again become, like Naaman's, fair, pure, and
sweet as the flesh of a little child. It is not every Gehazi whose
leprosy comes out in his flesh, and makes him loathsome to his fellows.
How many Gehazis move about among us, burying their leprosy within, but
none the less plague-stricken and perilous! Happy those who have no dark
chambers in their being, haunted by the skeletons of their dead lusts,
sins, or crimes--skeletons which never fail to come forth at their
banquets to scare them, choosing ruthlessly the hours of their festivity
and triumph to murder all their joys. There may be some readers of these
words who know this in all its horror, in whom the anguish of the
irrevocable and irreparable has killed all the joy of life--a word
spoken, a passion indulged, a deed done, which in one brief m