Why did He not say to them: "This ye may do. The world is sweet and fair. This ye may do, and all shall be easy to you"? Why, on the other hand, did He speak to them in the stern admonitions of the Decalogue: "Thou shalt. Thou shalt not"? God never hesitates to lay His great denials upon mankind and at last to stifle us beneath the restraint of death that He may issue us forth through that restraint into the infinite liberties of the life immortal.
Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as it can be so easily brushed away. "Oh, don't shadow our lives," you will say, "with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints. Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the field"—that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic incident in New York a few years ago—I do not need to recall the details of it—when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers published a letter which the girl had written to a friend:
