Surely of those words it is true, "blessed are they who, going through
the vale of misery, find therein a well, and the pools are filled with
water." Know you not what I mean? Happier, perhaps, are you--the young
at least among you--if you do not know. But some of you must know too
well. It is to them I speak. Were you never not merely puzzled--all
thinking men are that--but crushed and sickened at moments by the mystery
of evil? Sickened by the follies, the failures, the ferocities, the
foulnesses of mankind, for ages upon ages past? Sickened by the sins of
the unholy many--sickened, alas! by the imperfections even of the holiest
few? And have you never cried in your hearts with longing, almost with
impatience, Surely, surely, there is an ideal Holy One somewhere, or else
how could have arisen in my mind the conception, however faint, of an
ideal holiness? But where, oh where? Not in the world around, strewed
with unholiness. Not in myself--unholy too, without and within--seeming
to myself sometimes the very worst company of all the bad company I meet,
because it is the only bad company from which I cannot escape. Oh, is
there a Holy One, whom I may contemplate with utter delight? and if so,
where is He? Oh, that I might behold, if but for a moment, His perfect
beauty, even though, as in the fable of Semele of old, the lightning of
His glance were death. Nay, more, has it not happened to some here--to
clergyman, lawyer, physician, perhaps, alas! to some pure-minded, noble-
hearted woman--to be brought in contact perforce with that which truly
sickens them--with some case of human folly, baseness, foulness--which,
however much their soul revolts from it, they must handle, they must toil
over many weeks and months, in hope that that which is crooked may be
made somewhat straight, till their whole soul was distempered, all but
degraded, by the continual sight of sin, till their eyes seemed full of
nothing but the dance of death, and their ears of the gibbering of
madmen, and their nostrils with the odours of the charnel house, and they
longed for one breath of pure air, one gleam of pure light, one strain of