If I were a duly licensed pardoner, I should have a number of nicely engraved indulgences for what are called sins of omission. Not that I should attempt to extenuate the graver sort. I should not hold out false hopes to thankless sons or indifferent husbands. To be followed by such riff-raff would spoil my trade with the better classes. I should not have anything in my wallet for the acrimonious critic, who brings a railing accusation against his neighbor, and omits to sign his name. Some omissions are unpardonable.
I should, at the beginning, confine my traffic to those sins which easily beset conscientious persons about half past two in the morning. We have warrant for thinking that the sleep of the just is refreshing. This is doubtless true of the completely just; but with the just man in the making it is frequently otherwise. There is a stage in his strenuous moral career which is conducive to insomnia.
Having gone to sleep because he was tired, he presently awakes for the same reason. He is, however, only half awake. Those kindly comforters, Common-sense, Humor, and Self-esteem, whose function it is to keep him on reasonably good terms with himself while he is doing his necessary work, are still dozing.
Then Conscience appears,—a terrible apparition. There is a vague menace in her glance. The poor wretch cowers beneath it. Then is unrolled the lengthening list of the things left undone which ought to have been done. Every unwritten letter and uncalled call and unattended committee meeting and unread report emerges from the vasty deep and adds its burden of unutterable guilt. The Thing That Was Not Worth Doing arises and demands with insatiate energy that it be done at once. The Thing Half-done, because there was no time to finish it, appears with wan face accusing him of its untimely taking off. The Stitch not Taken in Time appears with its pitiful ninefold progeny all doomed because of a moment’s inattention. It seems that his moral raiment, instead of being put together with an eye to permanency, has been stitched on a single-thread machine and the end of the seam never properly fastened. Now he is pulling at the thread, and he sees the whole fabric unraveling before his eyes.
His past existence looms before him as a battlefield with a perpetual conflict of duties,—each duty cruelly slain by its brother duty. While the wailing of these poor ghosts is in his ears he cannot rest. And yet he knows full well that at half past two in the morning the one inexorable duty is that he should go to sleep. Conscience points to this as another duty left undone. Then begins a new cycle of self-reproach.
At such times the sight of an indulgence neatly framed hanging upon the bedroom wall would be worth more than it would cost. It would save doctor’s bills.
Even in our waking hours there is a tendency for the sins of omission and the sorrows of omission to pile up in monstrous fashion. There is a curious ingenuity which some persons have in loading themselves with burdens which do not belong to them, and in extracting melancholy reflections out of their good fortune. They will not frankly accept a blessing in its own proper form,—it must come to them in a mournful disguise. Poets seem particularly subject to these inversions of feeling. Here are some lines entitled “Two Sorrows:”—
Before Love came my eyes were dim with tears
Because I had not known her gentle face.
Softly I said, “But when across the years