And yet we do so, I fear;
and show daily that we do so by our use of the word: for out of the
abundance of the heart man's mouth speaketh. By his words he is
justified, and by his words he is condemned; and there is no surer
sign of what a man's real belief is, than the sense in which lie
naturally, as it were by instinct, uses certain words.
And what is the cause?
Shall I say it? If I do, I blame not you more than I blame myself,
more than I blame this generation. But it seems to me that there is
a little--or not a little--atheism among us now-a-days; that we are
growing to be 'without God in the world.' We are ready enough to
believe that God has to do with the next world: but we are not ready
to believe that He has to do with this world. We, in this
generation, do not believe that in God we live, and move, and have
our being. Nay, some object to capital punishment, because (so they
say) 'it hurries men into the presence of their Maker;' as if a human
being could be in any better or safer place than the presence of his
Maker; and as if his being there depended on us, or on any man, and
not on God Almighty alone, who is surely not so much less powerful
than an earthly monarch, that He cannot keep out of His presence or
in it whomsoever He chooses. When we talk of being 'ushered into the
presence of God,' we mean dying; as if we were not all in the
presence of God at this moment, and all day long.
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