or do; to marry or
give in marriage; to have this meeting or that parting; to give a
feast or partake of one; to fear sickness, and to keep it off; or to
be sick, and to try and get better:--all this sort of life, down to
its veriest trifles, they understand and sympathise with, and busy
themselves about. But what of God and Christ?--of eternal joy or
sorrow?--of how a man should live to God, please Him, enjoy Him, love
Him, and walk daily in fellowship with Him? What of such questions
as,--What shall become of us in eternity? What shall we do to be
saved? How shall we obtain life eternal? How shall we fulfil the end
of our being? All this--oh, strange mystery!--has no interest to them.
These thoughts, or any like these, never cross their mind, perhaps,
from morning till night, or from the first till the last day of the
year. They may, perhaps, have heard these words, read them in books,
or heard ministers speak them from the pulpit on Sunday, and they know
that the words have to do with what they call "religion," but never
think they have to do with what awfully concerns themselves! They are
words, but not about realities; or if they express realities, yet
realities which belong to some world of mist, and cloud, and darkness,
far, far away--one not nearly so real as this world of their own, made
up of fields and barns, streets and shops, sea and ships, friends and
action! But what, let me ask, separates us from that world which we
think to be so very far off--so very unreal? The thin coat of an
artery! No more! Let the thin pipe burst through which our life-blood
is now coursing in the full play of health, and where then will our
present world, now so very real, be to us? In a single second it will
have vanished for ever from our grasp, like something we clutch at
in the visions of the night. And where then will that other world be
which to many is now so dim and unreal as not to be worth thinking
about? We, the same living persons, will be in it--in the midst of
all its realities; and with these we shall have to do, and with these
only, for ever and ever.

But many people do not _wish_ to think about the unseen future. It is
not so much that _no_ thoughts about it intrude themselves upon their
minds, as that all such thoughts are deliberately banished. It is with
the eternal future as with anything which here gives them pain,--they
"hate to think about it." This, of course, arises from the suspicion,
or rather the c