happening to some of you. You may feel that, judged even by your own
standard, which is more likely to be too low than too high, your life is
somehow unsatisfactory; your better instincts may be telling you that you
were born for something higher, purer, stronger than what you are or have
been; and you are cherishing the hope that it will be different with you
some day; your circumstances, you think, or your occupation, or your
companionship will have changed, and so you fondly imagine that you
yourself will be sure to change, as if your soul were just a weathercock
that answers to every changing breeze. So perhaps you hope that some
habit of self-indulgence or idleness will drop off, or some evil temper
be eradicated; and whilst all this vague and mischievous dreaming goes on
you yield very likely to some besetting sin, making no serious effort to
get away from it now, and you yield all the more because of this
misleading hope that some day you will be touched by a supernatural hand,
and will rise up to a regenerate life. And yet our reason tells us that
all this is the very essence of self-deceit, and that such dreams and
hopes are the devil's most subtle temptation. This kind of vain hope is
based on a complete misconception of the nature of our conflict with sin,
and the way to escape from it. To think thus of spiritual gifts and the
growth of the spiritual life, is to follow a very dangerous delusion. It
was just such a misunderstanding that is expressed in the hope of Dives
about his brethren: "If one went unto them from the dead, they will
repent." Their ordinary daily teachings, he seems to say, the voice of
Moses and of the prophets, the examples of good men around them, the
warnings, the exhortations, these, being so familiar, may not have
startled them out of their sin; but if only one were to go to them from
the dead, some messenger of strange voice and aspect, who had seen hell,
and could paint its horrors, then surely the course of their life would
be checked and changed, and their spirit would wake up in them, and they
would sin no more. But to all this comes back the stern warning of the