I suppose that most of us have to travel a very well-worn road, and
that our course, in the cases of all except those in early life, is
liker that of a millhorse than an untrodden path. Most of us are
continually treading again in the prints of our own footsteps. A long,
weary stretch of monotonous duties, and the repetition of the same
things to-day that we did yesterday is the destiny of most of us.
Some of us, perhaps, may be standing upon the verge of some new scenes
in our lives. Some of you young people may have come up to a great city
for the first time to carve out a position for yourselves, and are for
the first time encompassed by the temptations of being unknown in a
crowd. Some of you may be in new domestic circumstances, some with new
sorrows, or tasks, or difficulties pressing upon you, calling for
wisdom and patience. It is quite likely that there may be some who, in
the most prosaic and literal sense of the words, are entering on a path
altogether new and untrodden. But they will be in the minority, and for
the most of us the days that were full of new possibilities are at an
end, and we have to expect little more than the monotonous repetition
of the habitual, humdrum duties of mature life. We have climbed the
winding paths up the hill, and most of us are upon the long plateau
that stretches unvaried, until it begins to dip at the further edge.
And some of us are going down that other side of the hill.
But whatever may be the variety in regard to the mere externals of our
lives, how true it is about us all that even the most familiar duties
of to-day are not quite like the same duties when they had to be done
yesterday; and that the path for each of us--though, as we go along, we
find in it nothing new--is yet an untrodden path! For we are not quite
the same as we were yesterday, though our work may be the same, and the
difference in us makes it in some measure different.
But what mainly makes even the most well-beaten paths new at the
thousandth time of traversing them is our ignorance of what may be
waiting round the next turn of the road. The veil that hangs before and
hides the future is a blessing, though we sometimes grumble at it, and
sometimes petulantly try to make pinholes through it, and peep in to
see a little of what is behind it. It brings freshness into our lives,
and a possibility of anticipation, and even of wonder and expectation,
that prevents us from stagnating. Even in the most habitual repetition
of the same tasks 'ye have not passed this way heretofore.' And life
for every one of us is still full of possibilities so great and so
terrible that we may well feel that the mist that covers the future is
a blessing and a source of strength for us all.
Our march through time is like that of men in a mist, in which things
loom in strangely distorted shapes, unlike their real selves, until we
get close up to them, and only then do we discover them.
So for us all the path is new and unknown by reason of the sudden
surprises that may be sprung upon us, by reason of the sudden
temptations that may start up at any moment in our course, by reason of
the earthquakes that may shatter the most solid-seeming lives, by
reason of the sudden calamities that may fall upon us. The sorrows that
we anticipate seldom come, and those that do come are seldom
anticipated. The most fatal bolts are generally from the blue. One
flash, all unlooked for, is enough to blast the tree in all its leafy
pride. Many of us, I have no doubt, can look back to times in our lives
when, without anticipation on our parts, or warning from anything
outside of us, a smiting hand fell upon some of our blessings. The
morning dawned upon the gourd in full vigour of growth, and in the
evening it was stretched yellow and wilted upon the turf. Dear
brethren, anything may come out of that dark cloud through which our
life's course has to pass, and there are some things concerning which
all that we know is that they must come.
These are very old threadbare thoughts; I dare say you think it was not
worth your while to come to hear them, nor mine to speak them; but if
we would lay them to heart, and realise how true it is about every step
of our earthly course that 'ye have not passed this way heretofore,' we
should complain less than we do of the weariness and prosaic character
of our commonplace lives, and feel that all was mystical and great and
awful; and yet most blessed in its possibilities and its uncertainties.