A Christmas Sermon

A Christmas Sermon

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Stevenson
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Title: A Christmas Sermon
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: December 30, 2004 [eBook #14535]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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A CHRISTMAS SERMON
by
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
New York
1900

A CHRISTMAS SERMON
By the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for twelve
months;[1] and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and
seasonable manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-bed
sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Second,
wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson in human

incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king--remembered
and embodied all his wit and scepticism along with more than his usual
good humour in the famous "I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an
unconscionable time a-dying."
[Footnote 1: i.e. In the pages of _Scribner's Magazine_ (1888).]

I
An unconscionable time a-dying--there is the picture ("I am afraid,
gentlemen,") of your life and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours
are "numbered and imputed," and the days go by; and when the last of
these finds us, we have been a long time dying, and what else? The
very length is something, if we reach that hour of separation
undishonoured; and to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly
expression) to have served. There is a tale in Tacitus of how the
veterans mutinied in the German wilderness; of how they mobbed
Germanicus, clamouring to go home; and of how, seizing their
general's hand, these old, war-worn exiles passed his finger along their
toothless gums. _Sunt lacrymae rerum_: this was the most eloquent of
the songs of Simeon. And when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears
his marks of service. He may have never been remarked upon the
breach at the head of the army; at least he shall have lost his teeth on
the camp bread.
The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble character.
It never seems to them that they have served enough; they have a fine
impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to be singly
thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our enemies, those
desperate characters--it is we ourselves who know not what we
do;--thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than
we think: that to scramble through this random business with hands
reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man or woman with some
reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end to
be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done right well.
To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way
of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only
greed of hire.
And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require
much of others? If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it

not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of others? And
he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he
has been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not be tempted to think
his neighbour unconscionably long of getting hanged? It is probable
that nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is
certain we all think too much of sin. We are not damned for doing
wrong, but for not doing right; Christ would never hear of negative
morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with which he superseded thou
shalt not. To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to
defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our
fellow-men a secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we
should not dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it
with inverted pleasure. If we cannot drive it from our minds--one thing
of two: either our creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently
remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right, we are criminal
lunatics and should place our persons in restraint.