I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever,
I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow."
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!
"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'
Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops
Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the
possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be
one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of
amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death
acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a
theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however
harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly
peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to
live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not
pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of
noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising
to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect
Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will
(we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a
shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should
have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for
'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some
forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in
moments of danger.
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