and sailors, and with an absolute confidence in the justice of
her cause, went steadily, brightly, and cheerfully on with her work,
upheld by the moral courage which I put before you and before myself as
our example for to-day.

And so, once again, her moral courage took the form--a rare form, too,
in these days--of the courage of her own opinions. One statesman has
told us that he never differed from a matured opinion of his Sovereign
without a great sense of responsibility; another, that when he once
acted directly against it he found that he was wrong and she was right.
Another has pointed out how we have lost among the crowned heads of
Europe, in her personal influence among them, one of the strongest
influences in Europe for peace and righteousness. And, therefore, when
we think to ourselves of the difficulty of acting always
constitutionally and yet strongly, and to know that our Queen, on all
hands, is admitted to have done this through a long lifetime, we see a
third aspect of the moral courage which we have to seek to emulate.

Now, the question is--for these sermons are meant in no sense to be
mere panegyrics--In what way can we, gathered here on a Sunday
afternoon, incorporate into our characters something of the moral
courage which characterized the Queen?

And the first thing which strikes us is this: What a vast field it is
on which we have to exercise it. To those who have to see a great deal
of the sorrows of others, sometimes life simply seems one series of
undeserved calamities. Take, for instance, that unhappy man who,
recently, in this cathedral, shot himself, and by his own act passed
into the other world. Look into his history, and you will find nothing
specially wrong that he had done up to then. He had just been one of
the unfortunates amongst us. He had been for years a steady workman,
able to keep himself; then his joints got stiff, too stiff for work.
"I cannot go on living on your husband's earnings, Rose," he said, on
the morning that he died, and without, no doubt, a proper understanding
of the guilt of self-murder, by his own act he passed--so he
thought--out of trouble into rest. We do well to pray that we
comfortable people in the world may be pardoned for any carelessness
and selfishness on our part which makes the world so intolerable to
many of our fellow creatures. But still, though we may soften by our
pity the act which he did, and even for such an one we can only speak