any great principle most deeply, when you feel it in your own case.
And though every worthy mortal must be often taken out of himself,
especially by seeing the deep sorrows and great failures of other men,
still, in thinking of people of whom more might have been made, it
touches you most to discern that you are one of these. It is a very sad
thing to think of yourself, and to see how much more might have been
made of you. Sit down by the fire in winter, or go out now in summer and
sit down under a tree, and look back on the moral discipline you have
gone through,--look back on what you have done and suffered. Oh, how
much better and happier you might have been! And how very near you have
often been to what would have made you so much happier and better! If
you had taken the other turning when you took the wrong one, after much
perplexity,--if you had refrained from saying such a hasty word,--if you
had not thoughtlessly made such a man your enemy! Such a little thing
may have changed the entire complexion of your life. Ah, it was because
the points were turned the wrong way at that junction, that you are now
running along a line of railway through wild moorlands, leaving the warm
champaign below ever more hopelessly behind. Hastily, or pettedly,
or despairingly, you took the wrong turning; or you might have been
dwelling now amid verdant fields and silver waters in the country of
contentment and success. Many men and women, in the temporary bitterness
of some disappointment, have hastily made marriages which will embitter
all their future life,--or which at least make it certain that in this
world they will never know a joyous heart any more. Men have died
as almost briefless barristers, toiling into old age in heartless
wrangling, who had their chance of high places on the bench, but
ambitiously resolved to wait for something higher, and so missed the
tide. Men in the church have taken the wrong path at some critical time,
and doomed themselves to all the pangs of disappointed ambition. But I
think a sincere man in the church has a great advantage over almost all