And then, if we are really spared to see those trials we Bometimes think of, and which it is right that we should sometimes think of, the strength for them will come at the time.  They will not look nearly so black, and we shall be enabled to bear them bravely.  There is in human nature a marvellous power of accommodation to circumstances.  We can gradually make up our mind to almost anything.  If this were a sermon instead of an essay, I should explain my theory of how this comes to be.  I see in all this something beyond the mere natural instinct of acquiescence in what is inevitable; something beyond the benevolent law in the human mind, that it shall adapt itself to whatever circumstances it may be placed in; something beyond the doing of the gentle comforter Time.  Yes, it is wonderful what people can go through, wonderful what people can get reconciled to.  I dare say my friend Smith, when his hair began to fall off, made frantic efforts to keep it on.  I have no doubt he anxiously tried all the vile concoctions which quackery advertises in the newspapers, for the advantage of those who wish for luxuriant locks.  I dare say for a while it really weighed upon his mind, and disturbed his quiet, that he was getting bald.  But now he has quite reconciled himself to his lot; and with a head smooth and sheeny as the egg of the ostrich, Smith goes on through life, and feels no pang at the remembrance of the ambrosial curls of his youth.  Most young people, I dare say, think it will be a dreadful thing to grow old:  a girl of eighteen thinks it must be an awful sensation to be thirty.  Believe me, not at all.  You are brought to it bit by bit; and when you reach the spot, you rather like the view.  And it is so with graver things.  We grow able to do and to bear that which it is needful that we should do and bear.  As is the day, so the strength proves to be.  And you have heard people tell you truly, that they have been enabled to bear what they never thought they could have come through with their reason or their life.  I have no fear for the Christian man, so he keeps to the path of duty.  Straining up the steep hill, his heart will grow stout in just proportion to its steepness.  Yes, and if the call to martyrdom came, I should not despair of finding men who would show themselves equal to it, even in this commonplace age, and among people who wear Highland cloaks and knickerbockers.  The martyr’s strength would come with the martyr’s day.  It is because there is no call for it now, that people look so little like it.

It is very difficult, in this world, to strongly enforce a truth, without seeming to push it into an extreme.  You are very apt, in avoiding one error, to run into the opposite error; forgetting that truth and right lie generally between two extremes.  And in agreeing with Sydney Smith, as to the wisdom and the duty of ’taking short views,’ let us take care of appearing to approve the doings of those foolish and unprincipled people who will keep no out-look into