If life could, by any process, be made insensible to pain and pleasure; if the human heart were hard as adamant, then avarice, ambition, and sensuality might channel out their paths in it, and make it their beaten way; and none would wonder or protest. If we could be patient under the load of a mere worldly life; if we could bear that burden as the beasts bear it; then, _like_ beasts, we might bend all our thoughts to the earth; and no call from the great Heavens above us would startle us from our plodding and earthly course.
But we art _not_ insensible brutes, who can refuse the call of reason and conscience. The soul is capable of remorse. When the great dispensations of life press down upon us, we weep, and suffer and sorrow. And sorrow and agony desire other companionships than worldliness and irreligion. We are not willing to bear those burdens of the heart, fear, anxiety, disappointment, and trouble, without any object or use. We are not willing to suffer, to be sick and afflicted, to have our days and months lost to comfort and joy, and overshadowed with calamity and grief, without advantage or compensation; to barter away the dearest treasures, the very sufferings, of the heart; to sell the life-blood from failing frame and fading cheek, our tears of bitterness and groans of anguish, for nothing. Human nature, frail, feeling, sensitive, and sorrowing, cannot bear to suffer for nought.
Everywhere, human life is a great and solemn dispensation. Man, suffering, enjoying, loving, hating, hoping, and fearing, chained to the earth and yet exploring the far recesses of the universe, has the power to commune with God and His angels. Around this great action of existence the curtains of Time are drawn; but there are openings through them which give us glimpses of eternity. God looks down upon this scene of human probation. The wise and the good in all ages have interposed for it, with their teachings and their blood. Everything that exists around us, every movement in nature, every counsel of Providence, every interposition of God, centres upon one point--the fidelity of man. And even if the ghosts of the departed and remembered could come at midnight through the barred doors of our dwellings, and the shrouded dead should glide through the aisles of our churches and sit in our Masonic Temples, their teachings would be no more eloquent and impressive than the dread realities of life; than those memories of misspent years, those ghosts of departed opportunities, that, pointing to our conscience and eternity, cry continually in our ears, "_Work while the day lasts! for the night of death cometh, in which no man can work_."