Now, that strange capacity that men have of ignoring a certain future is seen at work all round about us in every region of life.  I wonder how many young men there are in Manchester to-day that have begun to put their foot upon the wrong road, and who know just as well as I do that the end of it is disease, blasted reputation, ruined prospects, perhaps an early death.  Why! there is not a drunkard in the city that does not know that.  Every man that takes opium knows it.  Every unclean, unchaste liver knows it; and yet he can hide the thought from himself, and go straight on as if there was nothing at all of the sort within the horizon of possibility.  It is one of the most marvellous things that men have that power; only beaten by the marvel that, having it, they should be such fools as to choose to exercise it.  The peasants on the slopes of Vesuvius live very careless lives, and they have their little vineyards and their olives.  Yes, and every morning when they come out, they can look up and see the thin wreath of smoke going up in the dazzling blue, and they know that some time or other there will be a roar and a rush, and down will come the lava.  But ‘a short life and a merry one’ is the creed of a good many of us, though we do not like to confess it.  Some of you will remember the strange way in which ordinary habits survived in prisons in the dreadful times of the French Revolution, and how ladies and gentlemen, who were going to have their heads chopped off next morning, danced and flirted, and sat at entertainments, just as if there was no such thing in the world as the public prosecutor and the tumbril, and the gaoler going about with a bit of chalk to mark each door where were the condemned for next day.

That same strange power of ignoring a known future, which works so widely and so disastrously round about us, is especially manifested in regard to religion.  The great bulk of English men and women who are not Christians, and the little sample of such that I have in my audience now, as a rule believe as fully as we do the truths which they agree to neglect.  Let me speak to them individually.  You believe that death will introduce you into a world of two halves—­that if you have been a good, religious man, you will dwell in blessedness; that if you have not, you will not—­yet you never did a single thing, nor refrained from a single thing, because of that belief.  And when I, and men of my profession, come and plead with you and try to get through that strange web of insensibility that you have spun round you, you listen, and then you say, with a shrug, ‘He prophesies of things that are far off.’ and you turn with relief to the trivialities of the day.  Need I ask you whether that is a wise thing or not?