“we were to see a man in imminent danger of immediate destruction, and there was one way of escape, and but one, which we saw and he did not, should we feel any delicacy in running up to him and urging him to fly for his life?  Is it not a want of faith on our part that causes the reluctance and hesitation we all feel in urging others to avoid a peril so much more momentous?”

Mr. Beecher said the cases were not parallel.  Irreligious persons, he remarked, were not in imminent danger of immediate death; they might die to-morrow; but in all probability they would not, and an ill-timed or injudicious admonition might forever repel them.  We must accept the doctrine of probabilities, and act in accordance with it in this particular, as in all others.

Another brother had a puzzle to present for solution.  He said that he too had experienced the repugnance to which allusion had been made; but what surprised him most was, that the more he loved a person, and the nearer he was related to him, the more difficult he found it to converse with him upon his spiritual state.  Why is this?  “I should like to have this question answered,” said he, “if there is an answer to it.”

Mr. Beecher observed that this was the universal experience, and he was conscious himself of a peculiar reluctance and embarrassment in approaching one of his own household on the subject in question.  He thought it was due to the fact that we respect more the personal rights of those near to us than we do those of others, and it was more difficult to break in upon the routine of our ordinary familiarity with them.  We are accustomed to a certain tone, which it is highly embarrassing to jar upon.

Captain Duncan related two amusing anecdotes to illustrate the right way and the wrong way of introducing religious conversation.  In his office there was sitting one day a sort of lay preacher, who was noted for lugging in his favorite topic in the most forbidding and abrupt manner.  A sea-captain came in who was introduced to this individual.

“Captain Porter,” said he, with awful solemnity, “are you a captain in Israel?”

The honest sailor was so abashed and confounded at this novel salutation, that he could only stammer out an incoherent reply; and he was evidently much disposed to give the tactless zealot a piece of his mind expressed in the language of the quarter-deck.  When the solemn man took his leave, the disgusted captain said, “If ever I should be coming to your office again, and that man should be here, I wish you would send me word, and I’ll stay away.”

A few days after, another clergyman chanced to be in the office, no other than Mr. Beecher himself, and another captain came in, a roistering, swearing, good-hearted fellow.  The conversation fell upon sea-sickness, a malady to which Mr. Beecher is peculiarly liable.  This captain also was one of the few sailors who are always sea-sick in going to sea, and gave a moving account of his sufferings from that cause.  Mr. Beecher, after listening attentively to his tale, said,