Ay, so we think. Yet those nine lepers were men of like passions
with ourselves; and what they did, we perhaps might do in their
place. It is very humbling to think so: but the Bible is a
humbling book: and, therefore, a wholesome book, profitable for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. And I am
very much afraid that when the Bible tells us that nine out of ten
of those lepers were ungrateful to God, it tells us that nine out of
ten of us are ungrateful likewise.
Ungrateful to God? I fear so; and more ungrateful, I fear, than
those ten lepers. For which of the two is better off, the man who
loses a good thing, and then gets it back again; or the man who
never loses it at all, but enjoys it all his life? Surely the man
who never loses it at all. And which of the two has more cause to
thank God? Those lepers had been through a very miserable time;
they had had great affliction; and that, they might feel, was a set-
off against their good fortune in recovering their health. They had
bad years to balance their good ones. But we--how many of us have
had nothing but good years? Oh consider, consider the history of
the average of us. How we grow up tolerably healthy, tolerably
comfortable, in a free country, under just laws, with the power of
earning our livelihood, and the certainty of keeping what we earn.
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