iling; but from this shadow of a chance, small or great, how
if he has recoiled by a treasonable _lachete_? The effort _might_ have been
without hope; but to have risen to the level of that effort, would have
rescued him, though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to his
duties.

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down
in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned
to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such
a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures--muttering
under ground in one world, to be realized perhaps in some other. Upon the
secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected at intervals,
perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of
meeting a lion, and, from languishing prostration in hope and vital energy,
that constant sequel of lying down before him, publishes the secret
frailty of human nature--reveals its deep-seated Pariah falsehood to
itself--records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that
dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for
every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden.
Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of
his own individual will; once again a snare is made ready for leading him
into captivity to a luxury of ruin; again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the
man falls from innocence; once again, by infinite iteration, the ancient
Earth groans to God, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her
child; "Nature, from her seat, sighing through all her works," again "gives
signs of woe that all is lost;" and again the counter sigh is repeated to
the sorrowing heavens of the endless rebellion against God. Many people
think that one man, the patriarch of our race, could not in his single
person execute this rebellion for all his race. Perhaps they are wrong.
But, even if not, perhaps in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies
for himself the original act. Our English rite of "Confirmation," by which,
in years of awakened reason, we take upon us the engagements contracted
for us in our slumbering infancy,--how sublime a rite is that! The little
postern gate, through which the baby in its cradle had been silently placed
for a time within the glory of God's countenance, suddenly rises to the
clouds as a triumphal arch, through which, with b