The After-glow of a Great Reign | Page 5

pointed out how we have lost among the crowned heads of
Europe, in her personal influence among them, one of the strongest
influences in Europe for peace and righteousness. And, therefore, when
we think to ourselves of the difficulty of acting always constitutionally
and yet 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