Seite:Marsh Hallig 1856.djvu/111

111

CONSCIENCE.

a smiling sunshine beckons to you, if for once you will
not interpret the commands of God so narrowly and
strictly, or will clothe it in the form of a more agreeable
truth. On the other hand, heavy clouds hang around
thy path, and prepare to discharge their hail-stones
and lightning upon thee and thine, upon the harvest
of those nearest thee, if without trembling and hes-
itation thou still remainest steadfast to the letter of the
law. Remain steadfast unto death, that thou mayst
win life. Thou shalt so counsel thine immortal soul,
that she may be able to stand before the Judge of the
quick and the dead. Let him care for the conse-
quences. They are in his hands, the hands of an al-
mighty God, of a merciful Father. They are not thy
concern. But it is thine to be found faithful. Let this
suffice thee, even if experience did not show how often
our calculations of consequences prove erroneous, how
the day brings forth night and night the day. Still
must all things, be they poverty or riches, success or
misfortune, life or death, work together for good to him
who can say "Here am I, Lord ; Thy word is a lamp to
my path."
  Whence comes then all this pitiful worldliness among
so called "good men ?" Whence among them those
many "innocent weaknesses," those nice shrinking
evasions when God requires a new burnt-offering on
the altar of truth. Because they have made their vir-
tue for themselves, that like a convenient and pleasant
pillow they may shift it now to this side, now to that,
to prop their earthly slumbers. Because they have
planted a shady park in the desert at the foot of Sinai,
which conceals the mountnin from their sight, while