To fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might
seem comparatively venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But
to fail in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands
the final interests of another,--a fellow creature shuddering between
the gates of life and death: this, to a man of apprehensive conscience,
would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality with the misery of
a bloody calamity. You are called upon, by the case supposed, possibly
to die, but to die at the very moment when, by any even partial failure
or effeminate collapse of your energies, you will be self-denounced as
a murderer. You had but the twinkling of an eye for your effort, and
that effort might have been unavailing; but to have risen to the level
of such an effort would have rescued you, though not from dying, yet
from dying as a traitor to your final and farewell duty.
The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far
down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are
summoned to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy
outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's
natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly
projected, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to
childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in
hope and the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down
before the lion publishes the secret frailty of human nature--reveals
its deep-seated falsehood to itself--records its abysmal treachery.
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