ho believe not this--who think this
cloud of life has no such close--that it is to float, revealed and
illumined, upon the floor of heaven, in the day when He cometh with
clouds, and every eye shall see Him.[253] Some day, you believe,
within these five, or ten, or twenty years, for every one of us the
judgment will be set, and the books opened.[254] If that be true,
far more than that must be true. Is there but one day of judgment?
Why, for us every day is a day of judgment--every day is a Dies
Irae,[255] and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its
West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are
opened? It waits at the doors of your houses--it waits at the
corners of your streets; we are in the midst of judgment--the
insects that we crush are our judges--the moments that we fret away
are our judges--the elements that feed us, judge, as they
minister--and the pleasures that deceive us, judge as they indulge.
Let us, for our lives, do the work of Men while we bear the form of
them, if indeed those lives are _Not_ as a vapour, and do _Not_
vanish away.

"The work of men"--and what is that? Well, we may any of us know very
quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it. But many of
us are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of
what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of
Ananias,[256] and it is a mortal one--we want to keep back part of the
price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only
harm in a cross was the _weight_ of it--as if it was only a thing to
be carried, instead of to be--crucified upon. "They that are His have
crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."[257] Does that
mean, think you, that in time of national distress, of religious
trial, of crisis for every interest and hope of humanity--none of us
will cease jesting, none cease idling, none put themselves to any
wholesome work, none take so much as a tag of lace off their footmen's
coats, to save the world? Or does it rather mean, that they are ready
to leave houses, lands, and kindreds--yes, and life, if need be?
Life!--some of us are ready enough to throw that away, joyless as we
have made it. But "_station_ in Life"--how many of us are ready to
quit _that_? Is it not always the great objection, where there is
question of finding something useful to do--"We cannot leave our
stations in Life"?

Those of us who really cannot--that is to say, w