January, 1933
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
3
For the New Year
A singer sang a song of tears, And the great world heard and wept; For he sang of the sorrows o f fleeting years, And the hopes which the dead past kept; And souls in anguish their burdens bore, And the world was sadder than ever before. A singer sang a song o f cheer, And the great world listened and smiledj For he sang of the love of a Saviour dear, And the trust of a little child; And) souls that before had forgotten to pray Looked up and went singing along the way. — S elected .
m j ew O jea r s MESSAGE By t h e l a t e ALEXANDER MACLAREN
two schools, one of which explained everything by invoking great convulsions, the other by appealing to the uniform action o f laws. There are convulsions in life. Tomorrow is the child of today, and yesterday was the father of this day. What we are springs from what we have been, and settles what we shall be. The road leads somewhither, and we follow it step by step. We make our characters by continuity of our small actions. Let no man think of his life as if it were a heap of unconnected points. It is a chain of links that are forged together inseparably. Let no man say, “ I do this thing, and there shall be no evil results im pressed upon my life in consequence of it.” It cannot be. We shall tomorrow be more of everything that we are today, unless, by some strong effort of repent ance and change, we break the fatal continuity and make a new beginning by God’s grace. But let us lay to heart this, as a very solemn truth which lifts up into mystical and un speakable importance the things that men idly call trifles, that life is one continuous whole, a march toward a defi nite end. Mark the emphasis of my text, “ Go thy way till the end” ! You, my contemporaries, you older men! do not fancy in the deepest aspect any life has ever a period in it in which a man may “ take it easy.” You may do that in regard to outward things, and it is the hope and the reward of faithfulness in youth and middle age that, when the gray hairs come to be upon us, we may slack off a little in regard to outward activity. But in regard to all the deepest things of life, no man may ever lessen hisThligence until he has attained the goal. And not only “ till the end,” but “ go thou thy way to the end.” That is to say, let the thought that the road has a ter mination be ever present with us all. There is a great deal of the so-called devout contemplation of death, which is anything but wholesome. People wejre never meant to be always looking forward to that close. Men may think of “ the end” in a hundred different connections. One man may say, “ Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Another man may say, “ I have only a little while to master this science, to make a name for myself, to win wealth. Let me bend all my efforts in a fierce determina tion—-made the fiercer because of the thought of the brevity of life—to win the end.”
“ But go thou thy way till the end be: f o r thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end o f the days” (Dan. 12 :13). h e r e a r e three points in this message— the journey, the pilgrim’s resting place, and the final home. “ Go thou thy way till the end be : for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.” T he J ourney That is a threadbare metaphor for life. Yet thread bare as it is, its significance is inexhaustible. But before I deal with it, note that very significant “ but” with which my text begins. The prophet has been asking for a little more light to shine on the dark unknown that' stretches before him. And his request is negatived— 1 “ but go thou thy way.” In the connection, that means, “ Do not waste your time in dreaming about or peering into what you can never see, but fill the present with strenuous service.” “ Go thou thy way.” Never mind the far-off issues ; the step before you is clear, and that is all that concerns you. Plod along the path, and leave tomorrow to take care of itself. There is a piece of plain, practical wisdom, none the less necessary for us to lay to heart because it is so obvious and com monplace. The figure implies perpetual change. The landscape glides past us, and we travel on through it. How impossible it would be for us older people to go back to the feelings, to the beliefs, to the tone, and to the temper with which we used to look at things thirty or forty years ago ! It is fool ish for us ever to forget that we live in a state of things in which constant alteration is the law, as surely as, when the train whizzes through the Country, the same landscape never meets the eye twice, as thé: traveler looks through the windows. Let us, then, accept the fact that nothing abides with us, and so not be bewildered nor swept away from our moorings, nor led to vain regrets and paralyzing retrospects when the changes come, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes with stunning suddenness, like a bolt out of the blue. If life is truly represented under the figure of a journey, nothing is more certain than that we sleep in a fresh hospice every night, and leave behind us every day scenes that we shall never traverse again. What madness, then, to be putting out eager and desperate hands to clutch what must be left, and so to contradict the very law under which we live ! Life is continuous. Gèologists used to be divided into
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