The After-glow of a Great Reign | Page 5

strongly, and to know that our Queen, on all hands, is admitted to have done this through a long lifetime, we see a third aspect of the moral courage which we have to seek to emulate.
Now, the question is--for these sermons are meant in no sense to be mere panegyrics--In what way can we, gathered here on a Sunday afternoon, incorporate into our characters something of the moral courage which characterized the Queen?
And the first thing which strikes us is this: What a vast field it is on which we have to exercise it. To those who have to see a great deal of the sorrows of others, sometimes life simply seems one series of undeserved calamities. Take, for instance, that unhappy man who, recently, in this cathedral, shot himself, and by his own act passed into the other world. Look into his history, and you will find nothing specially wrong that he had done up to then. He had just been one of the unfortunates amongst us. He had been for years a steady workman, able to keep himself; then his joints got stiff, too stiff for work. "I cannot go on living on your husband's earnings, Rose," he said, on the morning that he died, and without, no doubt, a proper understanding of the guilt of self-murder, by his own act he passed--so he thought--out of trouble into rest. We do well to pray that we comfortable people in the world may be pardoned for any carelessness and selfishness on our part which makes the world so intolerable to many of our fellow creatures. But still, though we may soften by our pity the act which he did, and even for such an one we can only speak softly about the dead; though we know full well that some of the best men that ever lived, in a fit of insanity, or under depression quite impossible for them to control, have passed, by their own hand, out of this world, yet we cannot hide from ourselves that self-destruction is an act of cowardice, that where men and women break down is not in physical courage, but in moral courage, and that those lines penned long ago are true to-day:
"When all the blandishments of life are gone, The coward slinks to death, the brave live on!"
But we need not go to such an exceptional occurrence as that to find a field for this exercise of moral courage. Take all those incidents of life which happen day after day--the little child snatched from us in all its beauty and its innocence: the bright lad shot upon the field of battle in a moment, taken away with all his brightness, and his laughter, and his merriment; the man who loses in middle life his money and has to begin the hard struggle of saving all over again--how are we to explain it? What can we say to light up in any degree so vast a problem? There is, my dear brothers and sisters, I believe, no full explanation here, but there is a belief which comforts us, and that is, that these calamities of life are all being used for a great purpose; that when the Scripture says of God that "He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver," it does give us some sort of clue which nerves us to bear what we have to bear. Those who pass from us, pass, we believe, into what has been called, "God's great Convalescent Home" in another world, but to us who have to suffer, who receive these strokes, the suffering is not useless; it is a furnace which has to fashion that heavenly tempered thing which we call "moral courage," and to produce it any suffering is worth bearing. Do think over that, you who may be going through the furnace now, do remember that you have not lost that lad, that child, for ever, that it is only a few years until you see him again; but, meanwhile, while he is prepared there, you are being prepared here. The character is everything, and if there can be produced in you and in me that moral courage which makes us like our Saviour, we shall not be sorry for it in the days to come.
And so, again, take that awful trial which comes at times of having to suffer under a false accusation. I saw someone this week whom I believe to be lying under a most terrible accusation which is absolutely false. And, if anyone of you has ever been through that terrible trial of suffering under an imputation on your honour, which you know to be false, but cannot prove to be false, you realize what a field such a state as that presents for moral courage. What