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We sometimes wake, too, in the dead ('If night, and it must be a very hard man that can read these night thoughts which are not poems, without being stirred by convictions more or less appalling. The man is still on his pillow, the world is still even to sublimity, the eyes are shut, or at least see nothing if they are open. Perhaps it is some crime that has murdered sleep, and perhaps not. Great thoughts, and wonderfully distinct, crowd in, stirring great convictions - all the more welcome to the good man, to the bad how terrible.
"Thou has visited me in the night," says David, " thou has tried me." And again, "My reins instruct me in ill the night-season." What lessons of wisdom has every man's reins given him in the depths of the night! What revelations of thought have come into his mind! things how high, how close to other worlds! reproofs how piercing, in authority how nearly divine!
In all these specifications, it will be seen that I am not looking after any kind of argument for the truths of religion, or the vindication of God, but showing simply how we are attempered, practically, to the best things; that also, perhaps, without knowing it. Night and sleep are not a contrivance to furnish us with thoughts or notions, afterward to be applied to the moral uses of life, but are fomentations rather directly applied, producing, in that manner, modulations of feeling and mitigations of temper, such as quite undemonize our bad affinities. They do it also, it remains to say, in yet another way, still closer to the purposes of religion. It has been a great question with many, whether it is possible to make out any proof of the goodness of God from the mere light of nature? But it matters little whether we can or not, if only we are somehow made to feel that goodness, as we most certainly are, prior to all questions of argument or opinion. And I think it is done more effectually by the institution of sleep than by any thing else. Sleep is the perfectly passive side of our existence, and best prepares us to the selves of whatever is to be got oy mere receptivity. In the day we protect ourselves, or at least imagine we do. In the night we can not so much as think of doing it. We are switched off from all selfcare, and our very mind runs in grooves not laid by us. Having spent our loan of capacity, we fall back into God's arms to be refitted by him. I,Ve sleep in his bosom, even as a child in the bosom of its mother. And this falling asleep, in one view compulsory, has yet, in another, a strange kind of faith in it, in which we consent to drop off the verge of consciousness and be no more ourselves. The gulf we drop into is deep and wild, but we go down trustfully, and there we rest. And this we do every day, coming out as often new created for life's purposes. If we are not religious enough to say, "God giveth his beloved sleep," we do, at least, feel ourselves refreshed by some wondrous benightly somewhere in which we have trusted. Neither does calling that benignity fate at all satisfy us. There is dear good-will in it somewhere, which, if we should name, is God. And we have this feeling of Unknown Benignity the more certainly, that we gave ourselves to it in wrong and conscious ill-desert, which itself comports not with fate, and as little with any feeling but that of some divine goodness.
Besides, we are observers here as well as subjects of experience. We look on a good man's sleep, and there is nothing so beautiful. It is Luther who has worn out his powers in some great fight for God; or it is Washington half deserted by his country when bearing its burdens, and now, forgetting all, he has fallen back into God's arms, to forget also himself. There he lies uncaring, and receiving back, from God's gentle fomentations, the powers that shall furnish another great tomorrow. Standing at the open door of his chamber, and looking on his deep, still sleep, it is as if the eternal, ever faithful Goodness had him now to Himself! And yet more touching and closer to the tenderness of mercy is the very had man's sleep. He has drunk the cup of guilty pleasure dry. His tongue is weary of blasphemy. His deed of crime, perhaps of blood, is done, and the chapter of his day is ended. Having spent the power God gave him for good ill a violation of his throne, he goes remorsefully to his bed, and there forgets even his remorse. But God does not forget him or toss him out of the world, but he rests encircled by the goodness of God, nourished by his patience, to be refitted for tomorrow. Probably he will do just what he has done before, but he shall have his opportunity of good, though many times forfeited; for it is a great part of God's purpose in sleep to renew abused powers; else how many would never sleep again. Therefore, who of us can look on a world buried in sleep, a guilty, ungrateful world, broadly sunk in evil, and do it without some deeply affecting, overwhelming sense of the goodness of God. I say not that all men have it as a thought or opinion, they do not; but they do have it, which is -far better, as a feeling, that some unknown benignity inspheres them, call it by whatever name. In this feeling, too, all the most practical uses of life are concentered and made convergent on the bending of the soul to God, in ways of reverence and religion.
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