210
April 1927
T h e
K i n g ’ s
B u s i n e s s
If No Resurrection—Alas for Mani B y D e . F . W. F arrar
Some of you are too young to have ever stood, as all the eldest of us have,- by the bedside of death; but rtone of you are too young to feel how awful such a scene would be if we did not believe and know that Christ has risen from the dead. There on that low bed lies one we loved, for whom our whole hearts yearned, to whom our whole affections clung; he was noble and good, he was one of the very few who loved us, and he would have undergone for us any sacrifice, and he had borne bravely and meekly the buffets of the world. It was a short life, hardly checkered (good and beautiful and upright as it was), hardly checkered with any sunshine amid its shade; and now it is over; it ends here; the bright eye is dull and glazed; the gentle face is white and cold; the good brave heart has ceased to beat. He has no more a part in any thing that is done under the sun. The day was when he would have sprung to meet us, his whole face brightened at our approach; and now he lies there, cold to the voice of our affection, unmoved by our hot tears, with all the light of the soul quenched within him; gone, if there be no resurrection, to a dreary land where all things are forgot ten; all that was good in him, all that was great in him, perished for ever, as we and ours must perish soon. Oh, if there were no resurrection, how could we bear it ? Would not the thought crush us down for very grief into the same open grave? Many of you will have read the famous vision of him who saw a bridge of thregscore and ten arches, which spanned the rolling waters of a prodigious tide, and how the Genius said to him, “The bridge thou seest is Human Life; consider it attentively.” “And as I looked more attentively, I saw several of the passengers dropping through the bridge into the great tide that flowed under neath it; and upon examination perceived that there were innumerable trap-doors concealed in the bridge, which the passengers no sooner trod upon, but they fell through them into the tide and immediately disappeared. My heart was filled with a deep melancholy to see several dropping unexpectedly in the midst of mirth and jollity, and catching at everything that stood by them to save themselves. Multitudes were very busy in the pursuit of bubbles that glittered in their eyes and danced before them; but often, when they thought themselves within reach of them, their footing failed and down they sank. ‘Alas!’ said I, ‘man was made in vain! How is he given away to misery and-mortality! tortured in life and swal lowed up in death!’ ” The Chief End of Man Thomas Carlyle, toward the end of life, said, “The older I grow—and now I stand upon the brink of eternity rrl-the more comes back to me the sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: ‘What is the chief end of man ? To glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.’ ” There are all sorts of ambition in the world; there is no better sort than this. No ambition brings such measure of reward for the years of time artd for eternity.
E are told that the most savage nations live in a constant horror of death; their life is one long flight from it; it poisons their hap piness ; it bursts like a ghastly phantom upon their moments of peace. It is not death the agony that they shudder at, though there
may be something terrible in that, but death the mystery, and “next to God the most infinite of mysteries;” death that slips the last cable of the; soul, and sets it afloat on the shoreless sea of an eternal world ; there'''‘it ^îs that liés for them “the mute, ineffable, voiceless horror before which all human courage is abashed.” Can you wonder at this continuous dread ? They know of no world beyond the grave, and what would life be without the trust in that? How purposeless and mean, how weary and hopeless; a journey leading nowhither; a gate opening upon nothing; a ship sent forth only that she may founder in the bare, unknown deeps. Look steadily at life, and consider what it is ; how changeful, how short, how sorrowful. A light and thoughtless youth, of which the beauty and brightness pass rapidly away ; and after that, chance and change and bereavement ; cravings that meet with no fulfilment ; the dying away of hopes, the disappointment of ambition—a disappointment, perhaps, more bitter when it is gratified than when it fails ; the struggle for a livelihood, the cares of a family, the deceitfulness of friendship, the decay and weakness of health and faculties, an inevitable old age comes on ; and all the while heard at every silent interval with a plainness that creeps along the nerves, as though our ears caught the pacing of some ghostly tread in the far-off corridors of some lonely haunted house—all the while the monotonous echoing of death’s mysterious foot fall, heard and louder and louder, as day by day he ap proaches nearer and yet more near. And all this for so short a time that our petty schemes are broken off perpetually like a weaver’s thread, and the meanest works of our hands survive us and last on for other generations, to which our very names shall be cov ered with darkness. “And is this all? Is this, then, the period of our being? Must we end here? Did we come into the world only to make our way. through the press, amid many jostlings and hard struggles, with at best only a few brief deceitful pleasures interspersed, and so go out of it again ?” Alas for man if this were all, and nought beyond, O earth ! T h e D arkness of D eath And then again, if there be no resurrection of the dead, how infinitely pathetic, how quite unspeakably heartrend ing would be the phenomena of death itself. “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain; and your faith is also vain ; and we are found false witnesses of God ; and ye are yet in your sins ; and”—all this is terrible enough, but mark the pathos of the climax, a pathos too deep for tears—“and then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.” Perished! what a world of;, désolate an guish, what sighs of unutterable despair, lie hid in that strange word.
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