Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/211
became sedentary, and then, with sudden clearness, Marryatt's voice giving out the text.
There was no doubt what Marryatt was at—it seemed a very embarrassing theme he had chosen. He was working up his congregation to derive a lesson from the tragic suddenness of Brotherhood's end; in the midst of life, he reminded his hearers, they were in death; thence he would proceed to refute Brotherhood's own arguments of less than a fortnight ago as to the survival of human personality. It was a thoughtful sermon, but on sufficiently obvious lines. "We see around us a great deal of carelessness, a great deal of indifference, a great deal of positive unbelief, and we ask ourselves, do we not? whether after all the lessons we learned at our mother's knee were not just old wives' fables, good for us when we were children, but something that manhood would outgrow. We ask ourselves, do we not? whether after all the story of our life will be continued elsewhere, whether after all there is a crown to be gained. And we persuade ourselves, perhaps, or think we have persuaded ourselves, that there is nothing beyond, nothing eternal that we can strive for. Death will be a quiet sleep, to just and to unjust alike, nothing but a sleep. And then the old questioning comes back to us:
For, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause