And then, if we turn to the emblem with which the continuity of daily life and daily work is set forth here, as the path along which we travel, how much wells up in the shape of suggestion, familiar, it may be, but very needful and wholesome for us all to lay to heart!

The figure implies perpetual change.  The landscape glides past us, and we travel on through it.  How impossible it would be for us older people to go back to the feelings, to the beliefs, to the tone and the temper with which we used to look at life thirty or forty years ago!  Strangely and solemnly, like the silent motion of some gliding scene in a theatre, bit by bit, inch by inch, change comes over all surroundings, and, saddest of all, in some aspects, over ourselves.

    ’We all are changed, by still degrees,
     All but the basis of the soul.’

And it is foolish for us ever to forget that we live in a state of things in which constant alteration is the law, as surely as, when the train whizzes through the country, the same landscape never meets the eye twice, as the traveller looks through the windows.  Let us, then, accept the fact that nothing abides with us, and so not be bewildered nor swept away from our moorings, nor led to vain regrets and paralysing retrospects when the changes that must come do come, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes with stunning suddenness, like a bolt out of the blue.  If life is truly represented under the figure of a journey, nothing is more certain than that we sleep in a fresh hospice every night, and leave behind us every day scenes that we shall never traverse again.  What madness, then, to be putting out eager and desperate hands to clutch what must be left, and so to contradict the very law under which we live!

Then another of the well-worn commonplaces which are so believed by us all that we never think about them, and therefore need to be urged, as I am trying, poorly enough, to do now—­another of the commonplaces that spring from this image is that life is continuous.  Geologists used to be divided into two schools, one of whom explained everything by invoking great convulsions, the other by appealing to the uniform action of laws.  There are no convulsions in life.  To-morrow is the child of to-day, and yesterday was the father of this day.  What we are, springs from what we have been, and settles what we shall be.  The road leads somewhither, and we follow it step by step.  As the old nursery rhyme has it—­

    ’One foot up and one foot down,
     That’s the way to London town.’

We make our characters by the continual repetition of small actions.  Let no man think of his life as if it were a heap of unconnected points.  It is a chain of links that are forged together inseparably.  Let no man say, ’I do this thing, and there shall be no evil consequences impressed upon my life as results of it.’  It cannot be.  ’To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.’  We shall to-morrow be more of everything that we are to-day, unless by some strong effort of repentance and change we break the fatal continuity, and make a new beginning by God’s grace.  But let us lay to heart this, as a very solemn truth which lifts up into mystical and unspeakable importance the things that men idly call trifles, that life is one continuous whole, a march towards a definite end.