When I was a boy my father took me there and I watched as the winds rippled through the long grasses, and I could hear the wash of the river below, I was startled and sometimes shivered as I walked under the shadow of tall monuments, carved figures, and by stately tombs of marble. And once I started back and broke into tears at the sight of the sculptured form of “Old Mortality” bending above a slab with chisel and mallet in hand—and I suppose is there still, grown older in his stony face because more stained with the passing years.
What would it mean to you whose loved ones are lying in that cemetery or any other of the sleeping places of the dead?
Ah! it would mean the home-coming, the greeting, the rapturous kiss and hand-clasp of recognition, the joy of that heaven life that shall know no end and that immortality that shall compensate for all the weariness and the heartache of the mortal path here below.
Yes! it would mean to those of us who by faith in Christ Jesus are children of the living God, the gathering to our arms again of those who have left us and for whom our arms still ache to enfold them once more. And O my soul! it would mean the seeing of Him whom our soul loveth and who unfailingly has loved us; it would mean that boon of boons—seeing Him face to face.
Do you wonder the Holy Spirit who is the finger of God has written over against the word “hope,” that qualification, “blessed,” and affixed to it the demonstrative, “that,” so it doth read: “That blessed hope”?
And yet! and yet! there are men who call themselves the ministers of Christ who would blot out that hope and take away the vision of it from our souls.
With cold, acute, metallic voices in which you may hear the sound of the wheels of machinery and the buzz of business, they tell us that should the Lord suddenly come it would paralyze all industry, put an end to commerce and to trade, overthrow all progress, make worthless every high endeavour for the betterment of man, shut the doors of school, of college and university, render useless the architect’s and builder’s plans, throw down the mechanic’s tools, the artist’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel, the writer’s pen, still the orator’s tongue, make null and void the legislator’s high emprise and draw a line of atrophy across the unfolding processes of human life.
Oh, foolish, blind and slow to believe, do you not see that if the Lord should come it would lift our so-called civilization out of the slime and shame of its brazen folly and reeking, though perfumed sin into the glory of eternal righteousness and peace?
Do you not see that it would, at last, make men immortal and give them such beauty of form, such sanity and such culture and worth of being as all the gymnasia and all the eugenics of the hour have failed and will ever fail to achieve?
Do you not see that if the Lord should suddenly come it would at once open the gates of knowledge and bring us face to face with the secrets of the universe and make us masters under God of all natural laws such as all the curriculæ of all the institutions of learning, of applied science and philosophy have failed to impart?