Lay Morals | Page 9

magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions
absolute for the time and case. The moralist is not a judge of appeal,
but an advocate who pleads at my tribunal. He has to show not the law,
but that the law applies. Can he convince me? then he gains the cause.
And thus you find Christ giving various counsels to varying people,
and often jealously careful to avoid definite precept. Is he asked, for
example, to divide a heritage? He refuses: and the best advice that he
will offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth commandment which figures
so strangely among the rest. TAKE HEED, AND BEWARE OF
COVETOUSNESS. If you complain that this is vague, I have failed to
carry you along with me in my argument. For no definite precept can
be more than an illustration, though its truth were resplendent like the
sun, and it was announced from heaven by the voice of God. And life is
so intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not
twice in the ages, shall we find that nice consent of circumstances to
which alone it can apply.

CHAPTER III

Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to
our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment
slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our
surroundings to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt
our first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this connection;
a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in
the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from
several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever

conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a
green, commodious dwelling- place; and the reverberation of this
hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves
upon the lawn. Far off on all hands other dead embers, other flaming
suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the
farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the
distance. Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the
truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with
mankind on its bullet. Even to us who have known no other, it seems a
strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.
But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders
that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself. He inhabits
a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and renewing.
Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and the
freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass; his eyes,
his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and touch and hear,
to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently ponder on his
astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up and run, to perform the
strange and revolting round of physical functions. The sight of a flower,
the note of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he looks
unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous bonfires of the
universe. He comprehends, he designs, he tames nature, rides the sea,
ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins
interminable labours, joins himself into federations and populous cities,
spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit unborn
posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of unsurpassed fragility
and the creature of a few days. His sight, which conducts him, which
takes notice of the farthest stars, which is miraculous in every way and
a thing defying explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly,
and can be extinguished with a touch. His heart, which all through life
so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but a capsule, and may be
stopped with a pin. His whole body, for all its savage energies, its
leaping and its winged desires, may yet be tamed and conquered by a
draught of air or a sprinkling of cold dew. What he calls death, which is
the seeming arrest of everything, and the ruin and hateful
transformation of the visible body, lies in wait for him outwardly in a
thousand accidents, and grows up in secret diseases from within. He is

still learning to be a man when his faculties are already beginning to
decline; he has not yet understood himself or his position before he
inevitably dies. And yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no
thought of his last end, lives as though he were eternal, plunges with
his vulnerable body into the