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Consider, next, how differently tempered a realm of bad minds becomes, under the ordinance of night and sleep, from what they otherwise would be. Always fresh and strong, incapable of exhaustion as the spring of a watch, moral ideas would seldom get near enough to be felt. Evil is proud, stiffening itself always against the restrictions of God, and trying to be God itself.Therefore only a little modicum of capacity is given it, which runs out in a single day. After twelve or six. teen hours, the man that rose in the morning, full of might, as if a young eternity were in him, begins to flag, his nervous energy is spent, his limbs are heavy, his motions want spirit and precision. If he tries, for some particular reason, to hold on over whole days, his hands grow weaker, his eyelids more heavy, till, at length, he is obliged to resign himself to his fate, and drops, a merely unconscious lump, on the couch of the sleeper. Every day this lesson of frailty is given him.
The grass that is cut down by the mower's scythe docs not sooner wither and dry up, than the strength of the mower himself. We take our very capacity thus in little loans of only a few hours, and when the time has gone, we fall back into God's bosom again to be recruited, Were it not for this wise and morally beautiful arrangement, we might be as stiff' in wrong as so many evil angel".
Having only this short run of power, we are hum bled to a softer key. 'v\r e do not feel or act as we should, if we could rush on our way and have our sin as a law of ceaseless momentum, for the whole period of our life. For we are like an engine that is started off on the track by itself; the fuel and water will soon be exhausted, and then it must stop. But, if it could go on without fuel or water, it would even whirl itself across a continent and pitch itself into the sea. So, if, being loose in evil, we could rush interminably on, never to be spent or recruited by sleep, our bad momentum would itself drive us on, till we are hurried by the goal of life itself. We should be hard in our self-will beyond conception; our very ambitions and purposes would fly, bullet-wise, at their mark; consideration, conciliation, candor, patience, would an be driven out of the world by the remorseless persistency of out habit. Happily it is not so. We are stopped every few hours and brought to nothingness. Perhaps we do not say that we are made little, but, what is far better, we practically are so to ourselves, whether we think it or not; for the feeling is often truer than thought, and takes the type of fact when thought does not. We are not bad gods, or demons in our impetuosity, but men, men that go to sleep as children do and must. Being spaced off in this manner by stoppages, we consent to limits. We are softened and gentled in feeling, more perhaps than we would like to be. It is difficult not to be sometimes tender. Reason will sometimes get a chance to speak, and sometimes even preaching will meet a fair possibility. The tremendous passion for gain, and, speaking more inclusively, all that belongs to the world-spirit, and the spell it works in minds under evil, is broken every few hours by the counter-spin of sleep, and so the infatuation is restricted. So that, having this appointment in it, we can see that God has prepared even the world itself to be a corrector of worldliness. Even the astronomic revolutions he sets running as a mill against it. He buries the world in darkness that we may not see it. He takes the soul off into a world of unconsciousness and dream to break up its bad enchantment. He palsies the hand to make it let. go, palsies even the brain to stifle its infatuations. Were it not for this I verily. believe that what we call the world would get to be a kind of demoniacal possession.
In the same way all the various malignancies of evil passion are either extirpated or greatly softened. After some years, prejudices begin to be tired of being slept over. Jealousies rankle as long as they stay, but they get tired of staying, when we do not stay with them, but go to sleep over them. We can not hate an enemy save intermittently, but have to begin again every morning-which we have less and less appetite for, and finally come to like that morning best which does not begin at all. Were it not for this arrangement, our malignancies might burn us up. But the taking away of our consciousness is a kind of compulsory Sabbath, or truce of God. No hatred burns in the unconscious man. No revenge or jealousy lowers on his face in that soft hour of oblivion. If he went to bed heated by an ugly conversation, if he was severe and bitter in his judgments, if all charities were scorched a,way by his fierce denunciations, he will rise in the morning cool and sweet as the morning, and the gentle cheer of his voice -will show that he is clear of his bad mood, and likes to have it known. A man must be next to a devil who wakes angry. After his unconscious Sabbath he begins another day, and every day is Monday. How beautifully thus are we drawn, by this kind economy of sleep, to the exercise of aU good dispositions ! The acrid and sour ingredients of evil, the grudges, the wounds of feeling, the hypochondriac suspicions, the black torments of misanthropy, the morose fault-findings, are so far tempered and sweetened by God's gentle discipline of sleep, that we probably do not even conceive how demoniacally bitter they would be, if no such kind interruptions broke their spell.
It is also a great thing for us, as regards the interest and right ordering of life, that we are made into chapters in this manner, and are not left to that tedious kind of way which we sometimes find in a book that goes on to its end without beadings of transition, or resting-places of cessation. We go by dates and days, and a year is three hundred and sixty-five chapters of life. By these dates we remember ourselves, and without them could scarcely remember ourselves at all. Time itself would only be whisked away, as the trees are when we are whirled through a forest. And so we should have as little note of the present as memory of the past. It is not so when we come to the end of a day and stop. In one view it is a complete chapter, and we ourselves are substantially ended with it. Then, having passed away into the nowhere of sleep, we come out new-born in the morning-other and yet the same-to begin another more advanced chapter. The waking-point is different from the point where we vanished; and it is one of the pleasant things we think of, that to-day is going to be different from yesterday. If we really thought it was going to be the same day over again, we should be mortally sick of it in advance. No, we are going to do something, set on something, have or obtain something, in advance of what belonged to yesterday. And why not something better, best of all, wisest and holiest ? We do not always ask that question, but the fresh life of our new morning has at least some better affinity in it, as the flowers that have blossomed in the night are more fragrant than the old ones that have, all, the smell of yesterday in them. Not every morning is God's morning thus in the soul; but how much closer is that holier day to feeling, and easier to be conceived, for the new-born life that has opened so many chapters of morning experience. As one day of the year is certain to be Christmas, there ought to be some day in such a calendar of days when Christ is born to the soul - a sublime Anno Domini, at which all after-dates begin.
Sleep also greatly enlarges our mental experience, giving us a different sense of ourselves and our immortal capabilities. I make nothing of the argument from sleep and a return to consciousness in waking, for the fact of a resurrection and a future life. The faith of immortality depends on a sense of it begotten, not on an argument for it concluded. And here is the office of sleep, that it wakens the sense, while it does not furnish the argument. It is just that kind of experience that makes us, I might almost say, completely other and different to ourselves. If our life were a continuous waking state, fifty or seventy years long, having light and day to correspond, it might be difficult to say what we should be, but we certainly should not be what we are. Our sleep is not only a great mystery to philosophers, but a practical mystery to all men, even such as never bad a though of it. We are carried by it into a new world, as distinct from that of our waking hours as if our spirit were translated. The body is alive only as a vegetable lives; the senses are closed, the soul itself is unconscious, displaying yet its incapacity to cease from a
ction. The thoughts fly as swiftly as when we are awake, and sometimes a great deal farther and higher; we remember, imagine, hope, fear, hurrying on through this and unknown worlds, creating scenes of glory and pain, shuddering in perils, exulting in deliverance's, all unreal, yet for the time reality itself. The immortal element strives on, incapable of cessation, determined never to cease; displaying its inherent, essential, self asserting eternity. And so we become, as it were, a different self, that we may know the self we are; for if we make as little of our dreams or sleep-thoughts as we may, they do, at least, show us the fearfully sublime activity of our nature, that must still act, when we have no longer any will to action. What a discovery is it thus to a child. when first he begins to reach after the distinction of a dream! He has been somewhere, he knows not where; he has seen strange people, he knows not who: only the vanishing smiles and dimples playing on his face told more of the paradise he was in, hearing their sweet voices and looking on their beautiful faces, than he can even begin to stammer about when he wakes. If he was unwell or overcharged with food, he has probably fared differently; bad creatures have chased him, strange monsters have made strange noises, ogres have taken him in their teeth. Startled out of sleep, he clings in a tremor to his mother, and when she shows him that there is nobody in the room, that it was only a thought in his head, a dream, what is a dream? At that question he is working visibly for days, till the dream ceases more and more to be a fearful creature, and he begins to imagine that a dream is a kind of nobody or nothing that came out of himself. What a mystery is he thus beginning to be to himself And just so are we all passing out, so to speak, into this other-world state and returning, as many times as we have seen days, yet knowing nothing of it still, save that we get no understanding at all by our visits. Perhaps we are so dull as never to have had a question about the mystery. No matter, we are none the less altered by it. This double nature, capable of a double existence, is not the same it would be if we made no such excursions into unimagined states and worlds. It is great, greater than we can even think, and reaches farther than we can definitely know. Sleep is a spiritualizer, thus, in the constitution of nature itself. By it the capacity of other modes of existence is made familiar. Saying nothing of the faith of immortality, we get a sense in it of ourselves that very nearly contains that faith. It is scarcely possible, in this view, to overrate the importance of it in the moral training of souls.
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