an engagement was
impending, they used to bring up the hammocks from the bunks and pile
them into the nettings at the side of the ship, to defend it from
boarders and bullets. And then, after these had served their purpose of
repelling, they were taken down again and the crew went to sleep upon
them. That is exactly what some of my friends do with that misconception
of the genius of Christianity which supposes that it is concerned mainly
with another world. They put it up as a screen between them and God,
between them and what they know to be their duty--viz., the acceptance
of Christ as their Saviour. It is their hammock that they put between
the bullets and themselves; and many a good sleep they get upon it!

Now, that strange capacity that men have of ignoring a certain future is
seen at work all round about us in every region of life. I wonder how
many young men there are in Manchester to-day that have begun to put
their foot upon the wrong road, and who know just as well as I do that
the end of it is disease, blasted reputation, ruined prospects, perhaps
an early death. Why! there is not a drunkard in the city that does not
know that. Every man that takes opium knows it. Every unclean, unchaste
liver knows it; and yet he can hide the thought from himself, and go
straight on as if there was nothing at all of the sort within the
horizon of possibility. It is one of the most marvellous things that men
have that power; only beaten by the marvel that, having it, they should
be such fools as to choose to exercise it. The peasants on the slopes of
Vesuvius live very careless lives, and they have their little vineyards
and their olives. Yes, and every morning when they come out, they can
look up and see the thin wreath of smoke going up in the dazzling blue,
and they know that some time or other there will be a roar and a rush,
and down will come the lava. But 'a short life and a merry one' is the
creed of a good many of us, though we do not like to confess it. Some of
you will remember the strange way in which ordinary habits survived in
prisons in the dreadful times of the French Revolution, and how ladies
and gentlemen, who were going to have their heads chopped off next
morning, danced and flirted, and sat at entertainments, just as if there
was no such thing in the world as the public prosecutor and the tumbril,
and the gaoler going about with a bit of chalk to mark each door where
were the condemned for next day.