listens attentively to hear if there is any sound of water flowing underneath; if he hears it flowing noisily, it will be a long time before he trusts himself to the ice. Why so? The ice bears him up at the bank. Yes, but it would not do so in the middle of the stream, where it must necessarily be thinner, since the water makes such a noise at the bank. He knows that, therefore, although he might take a few steps without danger, yet he could not cross the river without imperilling his life, and so he prefers to go another way.
In the hour of death we shall have a knowledge of our actions that we had not in life. My dear brethren, our life is a passage, and a very dangerous one; for we have to bring our one immortal soul from time to eternity. Can we then afford to take blindly the first way that seems a little safe, and trust ourselves to it? No; he who wishes to act prudently and secure his soul’s salvation goes far more carefully to work. Now, he thinks, while I am strong and healthy, this or that appears good and desirable to me; but how will it be hereafter? Will it bring me to the haven of salvation? What shall I think of it at the end of my life? Oh, if we acted thus, how far different would be our opinion of things from what it now is! As it is, our understanding, especially in what concerns our souls, is darkened and blinded by many evil inclinations and appetites, by our love for creatures and by our own self-love, so that it is almost incapable of forming a correct judgment of good and evil. But when we come to the last supreme hour; when the lighted candle is in our hand, the eyes of the body are in deed dimmed, but the eyes of the mind become all the clearer; and how our judgment, our wishes and desires will then be altered! “When he shall sleep,” says Job of the vain worldling, “he shall open his eyes, and find nothing.”[1] When he begins to sleep the last sleep, his eyes will be opened for the first time, and he will see what he before neither wished nor tried to see. The sins that he committed through culpable ignorance and therefore did not look on as evil, or that he continued to commit in doubt, or that he excused and palliated, or even thought nothing of, " when he shall sleep/ when he is at the point of death, they shall weigh on his conscience like a mill stone.
Explained by a simile. Go down to the Moselle, my dear brethren, and see how easily a huge balk is drawn hither and thither by one man, as long as it floats in the water; but if even a part of it is on the bank it
- ↑ Cum dormierit, aperiet oculos suos, et nihil inveniet.—Job xxvii. 19.
