But at certain seasons He tells us of it more distinctly and in a greater variety of ways. Would you know what the Autumn teaches? Hear the Holy Ghost, Himself interpret it: "The voice said, cry; and I said, what shall I cry? All Flesh is grass and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field: the grass is withered and the flower is fallen." [Footnote 238] "In the morning man shall grow up like the grass; in the evening he shall fall, grow dry and wither." [Footnote 239] "Man born of a woman, liveth for a short time, and is filled with many miseries. He cometh forth as a flower and is destroyed; he fleeth as a shadow and never continueth in the same state." [Footnote 240]
[Footnote 238: Isaias xl. 6, 7.]
[Footnote 239: Ps. lxxxix. 6.]
[Footnote 240: Job xiv. 1, 2.]
Oh, do not require God always to speak to you in a voice of thunder: listen to Him when He speaks gently. Open your eyes and ears, and receive instruction from the sights and sounds of Nature. We are dying: the sighing winds tell us so. We are dying: the falling leaf tells us how Death will soon have power over us as a leaf carried away by the wind, and pursue us as a dry straw." [Footnote 241] We are dying: the harvest-man is discharged, so "our days are like the days of an hireling, and the end of labor draweth nigh." [Footnote 242] We are dying: the short days tell us that to us "the sun and the light and the moon and the stars will soon be darkened."[Footnote 243]
[Footnote 241: Job xiii. 25.]
[Footnote 242: Job vii. 1.]
[Footnote 243: Eccles. xii. 2.]
We are dying: the earth hath already wrapped itself in its winding-sheet of snow, to foretell to us the time when, stiff and cold, we shall be dressed for the grave. We are all dying. Are you young? Well, the young are dying. Life is but a lingering death. As soon as we are born, we began to draw to our end. Every path in life leads straight to the grave. Are you old? are you sick? Ah! then, there is a voice within you which repeats the warning from without. You are not as strong and well as you once were. Time was you felt within you a fount of health and strength that defied danger and despised precaution. What a strange, fierce joy it was for you to struggle with the buffetings of the wintry blast! But, somehow, you know not how, either it was an accident or an imprudence, there came over you now and then a pain, a cough, a strange weariness, and the raw wind steals away from your cheek the bloom which once it imparted, and sends a chill to your heart. What does it mean? I will tell you. It is the shadow of mortality. You are dying. Men do not realize this. They do not realize it of themselves, and they do not realize it of others. Death is always a surprise and an accident. It is one of the things in the world on which men do not count.
It is something which has nothing to do with us until the doctor stands over us, and says we have but a few days or a few hours to live. We speak of the dead with pity, as if they were the victims of some unlucky chance which we had escaped. This ought not to be so. "It is appointed for man once to die." [Footnote 244]