Isaac Watts; his life and writings, his homes and friends

by Edwin Paxton Hood

ALL THINGS PREACH THE END OF TIME.

“Time, hastening to its period, will furnish us with perpetual new occasions of holy meditation. Do I observe the declining day, and the setting sun sinking into darkness? So declines the day of life, the hours of labour, and the seasons of grace; oh may I finish my appointed work with honour ere the light is fled! May I improve the shining hours of grace ere the shadows of the evening overtake me, and my time of working is no more! Do I see the moon gliding along through midnight, and fulfilling her stages in the dusky sky? This planet also is measuring out my life, and bringing the number of my months to their end. May I be prepared to take leave of the sun and moon, and bid adieu to these visible heavens, and all the twinkling glories of them! These are all but the measures of my time, and hasten me on towards eternity. Am I walking in a garden, and stand still to observe the slow motion of the shadow upon a dial there? It passes over the hour lines with an imperceptible progress, yet it will touch the last line of daylight shortly: so my hours and my moments move onward with a silent pace; but they will arrive with certainty at the last limit, how heedless soever I am of their motion, and how thoughtless soever I may be of the improvement of time, or the end of it. Does a new year commence, and the first morning of it dawn upon me? Let me remember that the last year was finished, and gone over my head, in order to make way for the entrance of the present: I have one year the less to travel through the world, and to fulfil the various services of a travelling state: may my diligence in duty be doubled, since the number of my appointed years is diminished! Do I find a new birth-day in my survey of the calendar, the day wherein I entered upon the stage of mortality, and was born into this world of sins, frailties, and sorrows, in order to my probation for a better state? Blessed Lord, how much have I spent already of this mortal life, this season of my probation, and how little am I prepared for that happier world! How unready for my dying moment! I am hastening hourly to the end of the life of man, which began at my nativity: am I yet born of God? Have I begun the life of a saint? Am I prepared for that awful day which shall determine the number of my months on earth? Am I fit to be born into the world of spirits through the strait gate of death? Am I renewed in all the powers of my nature, and made meet to enter into that unseen world, where there shall be no more of these revolutions of days and years, but one eternal day fills up all the space with Divine pleasure, or one eternal night with long and deplorable distress and darkness? When I see a friend expiring, or the corpse of my neighbour conveyed to the grave: alas! their months and minutes are all determined, and the seasons of their trial are finished for ever; they are gone to their eternal home, and the estate of their souls is fixed unchangeably: the angel that has sworn their ‘time shall be no longer’ has concluded their hopes, or has finished their fears, and, according to the rules of righteous judgment, has decided their misery or happiness for a long immortality. Take this warning, oh my soul, and think of thine own removal! Are we standing in the churchyard, paying the last honours to the relics of our friends? What a number of hillocks of death appear all round us! What are the tombstones but memorials of the inhabitants of that town, to inform us of the period of all their lives, and to point out the day when it was said to each of them, your ‘time shall be no longer.’ Oh may I readily learn this important lesson, that my turn is hastening too! Such a little hillock shall shortly arise for me on some unknown spot of ground; it shall cover this flesh and these bones of mine in darkness, and shall hide them from the light of the sun, and from the sight of man, ‘till the heavens be no more.’ Perhaps some kind surviving friend may engrave my name, with the number of my days, upon a plain funeral stone, without ornament and below envy; there shall my tomb stand, among the rest, as a fresh monument of the frailty of nature and the end of time. It is possible some friendly foot may, now and then, visit the place of my repose, and some tender eye may bedew the cold memorial with a tear: one or another of my old acquaintance may possibly attend there to learn the silent lecture of mortality from my grave-stone, which my lips are now preaching aloud to the world: and if love and sorrow should reach so far, perhaps, while his soul is melting in his eye-lids, and his voice scarce find an utterance, he will point with his finger and show his companion the month and day of my decease. Oh that solemn, that awful day, which shall finish my appointed time on earth, and put a full period to all the designs of my heart and all the labours of my tongue and pen. Think, oh my soul! that while friends or strangers are engaged on that spot, and reading the date of my departure hence, thou wilt be fixed under a decisive and unchangeable sentence, rejoicing in the rewards of time well improved, or suffering the long sorrows which shall attend the abuse of it in an unknown world of happiness or misery.”

And we should think that many a believer has read the following with sentiments of delight:

CHRIST ADMIRED AND GLORIFIED IN HIS SAINTS.

“Astonishing spectacle! When the dark and savage inhabitants of Africa, and our forefathers, the rugged and warlike Britons, from the ends of the earth, shall appear in that assembly, with some of the polite nations of Greece and Rome, and each of them shall glory in having been taught to renounce the gods of their ancestors, and the demons which they once worshipped, and shall rejoice in Jesus the King of Israel, and in Jehovah the everlasting God. The conversion of the Gentile world to Christianity is a matter of glorious wonder, and shall appear to be so in that great day: that those who had been educated to believe in many gods, or no god at all, should renounce atheism and idolatry, and adore the true God only; and those who were taught to sacrifice to idols, and to atone for their own sins with the blood of beasts, should trust in one sacrifice, and the atoning blood of the Son of God. Here shall stand a believing atheist, and there a converted idolater, as monuments of the almighty power of grace. There shall shine also in that assembly here and there a prince and a philosopher, though ‘not many wise, not many noble, not many mighty are called.’[43] And they shall be matter of wonder and glory: that princes, who loved no control, should bow their sceptres and their souls to the royalty and Godhead of the poor Man of Nazareth: that the heathen philosophers, who had been used to yield only to reason, should submit their understandings to Divine revelation, even when it has something above the powers and discoveries of reason in it.

“Come, all ye saints of these latter ages, ‘upon whom the end of the world is come,’ raise your heads with me, and look far backwards, even to the beginning of time, and the days of Adam; for the believers of all ages, as well as of all nations, shall appear together in that day, and acknowledge Jesus the Saviour: according to the brighter or darker discoveries of the age in which they lived, He has been the common object of their faith. Ever since He was called ‘the Seed of the woman,’ till the time of His appearance in the flesh, all the chosen of God have lived upon His grace, though multitudes of them never knew His name. It is true, the greater part of that illustrious company on the right hand of Christ lived since the time of His incarnation, for the ‘great multitude which no man could number’ is derived from the Gentile nations. Yet the ancient patriarchs, with the Jewish prophets and saints, shall make a splendid appearance there: ‘one hundred and forty-four thousand are sealed among the tribes of Israel;’ these of old embraced the Gospel in types and shadows; but now their eyes behold Jesus Christ, the substance and the truth. In the days of their flesh they read His name in dark lines, and looked through the long glasses of prophecy to distant ages, and a Saviour to come; and now, behold, they find complete and certain salvation and glory in Him. ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them.’ They died in the hope of this salvation, and they shall rise in the blessed possession of it.

“Behold Abraham appearing there, the father of the faithful, ‘who saw the day of Christ, and rejoiced to see it;’ who trusted in his Son Jesus, two thousand years before He was born; his elder family, the pious Jews, surround him there, and we, his younger children, among the Gentiles, shall stand with him as the followers of his faith, who trust in the same Jesus almost two thousand years after He is dead. How shall we both rejoice to see this brightest day of the Son of Man, and congratulate each other’s faith, while our eyes meet and centre in Him, and our souls triumph in the sight, love, and enjoyment of Him in whom we have believed! How admirable and divinely glorious shall our Lord Himself appear, on whom every life is fixed with unutterable delight, in whom the faith of distant countries and ages is centered and reconciled, and in whom ‘all the nations of the earth appear to be blessed,’ according to the ancient word of promise.

“Then one shall say: ‘I was a sensual sinner, drenched in liquor and unclean lusts, and wicked in all the forms of lewdness and intemperance; the grace of God my Saviour appeared to me, and taught me to deny worldly lusts, which I once thought I could never have parted with. I loved my sins as my life, but He has persuaded and constrained me to cut off a right hand, and to pluck out a right eye, and to part with my darling vices; and behold me here a monument of His saving mercy.’

“‘I was envious against my neighbour,’ shall another say, ‘and my temper was malice and wrath; revenge was mingled with my constitution, and I thought it no iniquity; but I bless the name of Christ my Redeemer, who, in the day of His grace, turned my wrath into meekness; He inclined me to love even my enemies, and to pray for them that cursed me; He taught me all this by His own example, and He made me learn it by the sovereign influences of His Spirit. I am a wonder to myself, when I think what once I was. Amazing change, and Almighty grace!’