hardly anything to choose between them. It does not matter which you
accept; and perhaps some slight and fanciful consideration is allowed to
turn the scale. But now you look back, and you can see that _there_ was
the turning-point in your life; it was because you went there to the
right, and not to the left, that you are now a great English prelate,
and not a humble Scotch professor. Was there not a time in a certain
great man's life, at which the lines of rail diverged, and at which the
question was settled, Should he be a minister of the Scotch Kirk, or
should he be Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain? I can imagine a
stage in the history of a lad in a counting-house, at which the little
angle of rail may be pushed in or pushed back that shall send the train
to one of two places five hundred miles asunder: it may depend upon
whether he shall take or not take that half-crown, whether, thirty years
after, he shall be taking the chair, a rubicund baronet, at a missionary
society meeting, and receive the commendations of philanthropic peers
and earnest bishops, or be laboring in chains at Norfolk Island, a
brutalized, cursing, hardened, scourge-scarred, despairing wretch,
without a hope for this life or the other. Oh, how much may turn upon a
little thing! Because the railway train in which you were coming to a
certain place was stopped by a snowstorm, the whole character of your
life may have been changed. Because some one was in the drawing-room
when you went to see Miss Smith on a certain day, resolved to put to her
a certain question, you missed the tide, you lost your chance, you went
away to Australia and never saw her more. It fell upon a day that
a ship, coming from Melbourne, was weathering a rocky point on an
iron-bound coast, and was driven close upon that perilous shore. They
tried to put her about; it was the last chance. It was a moment of awful
risk and decision. If the wind catches the sails, now shivering as the
ship comes up, on the right side, then all on board are safe. If the
wind catches the sails on the other side, then all on board must perish.