en written passes from our mind and is remembered no
more; but it is there, and one day the books--the Book of Life, of our
life--will be opened, and the true meaning of the record revealed. Life
brings to us many gifts of many kinds, and as it lays them in our hands,
for our use and for our blessing, it is always, had we but ears to hear,
with the warning word, "Know thou, that for all these things, God will
bring thee into judgment."

It is, indeed, a tremendous thought. When Daniel Webster was once asked
what was the greatest thought that had ever occupied his mind, he
answered, "the fact of my personal accountability to God." And no man
can give to such a fact its due place without feeling its steadying,
sobering influence through all his life. Lament is often made to-day,
and not without reason, of our failing sense of the seriousness of life.
A plague of frivolity, more deadly than the locusts of Egypt, has fallen
upon us, and is smiting all our green places with barrenness. Somehow,
and at all costs, we must get back our lost sense of responsibility. If
we would remember that God has a right hand and a left hand; if we would
put to ourselves Browning's question, "But what will God say?" if
sometimes we would pull ourselves up sharp, and ask--this that I am
doing, how will it look then, in that day when "Each shall stand
full-face with all he did below"? if, I say, we would do this, could
life continue to be the thing of shows and make-believe it so often is?
It was said of the late Dean Church by one who knew him well: "He seemed
to live in the constant recollection of something which is awful, even
dreadful to remember--something which bears with searching force on all
men's ways and hopes and plans--something before which he knew himself
to be as it were continually arraigned--something which it was strange
and pathetic to find so little recognized among other men." But, alas!
this is how we refuse to live. We thrust the thought of judgment from
us; we treat it as an unwelcome intruder, a disturber of our peace; we
block up every approach by which it might gain access to our minds. We
do not deny that there is a judgment to come; but our habitual disregard
of it is verily amazing. "Judge not," said Christ, "that ye be not
judged;" yet every day we let fly our random arrows, careless in whose
hearts they may lodge. "Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall
give account thereof in the day of judgment;" yet