But assuming that we bear all this in mind, and hold fast to these fundamental gifts, and so escape those lower and baser forms of life which we meet all about in the world, spoiling the manhood and embittering
the age of so many men, we cannot forget the essential difference between mature years and the years of early growth.
As we grow towards manhood our life necessarily loses its childlike and unreflecting spontaneity in the ferment of thought, desire, and passion, and in the light of experience; and therefore it becomes a matter of no slight importance to estimate the value of that which we hold in our hands to-day, the nature of the web which our conduct is weaving, and the fateful character of any mistake in the purposes, notions, ambitions, or tastes that are, as a matter of fact, fixing the drift and direction of our life. But to do this amidst all the daily temptations of life is not always an easy matter; and it is certain that we shall not do it if we do not fully recognise, while our life is still young and unhampered, the importance of these two very obvious reflections, which, in fact, resolve themselves into one, that our time is essentially short, and that our opportunities are very fugitive.
In one sense, no doubt, there is a long stretch of time before most of you. As yet hope has more to say to you than memory. Some of you will look back on these early days from the distant years of another century. Your life’s journey may extend far away over the unexplored future, and may in some cases be a very long one; but, although this is possible, we are not allowed to forget that it is always precarious—unexpected graves are constantly reminding us how short may be the time of any one of us—how the night cometh.
But it is not merely of the literal shortness of our time, or the possible nearness of death, that our Lord’s words should set us thinking, when He warns us that the night cometh, and we must work while it is day.
If we measure our life by the things we should accomplish in it, by the character it should attain to, by the purposes that should be bearing fruit in it, and not by mere lapse of time, we soon come to feel how
very short it is, and the sense of present duty grows imperative. It is thus that the thoughtful man looks at his life; and he feels that there is no such thing as length of days which he can without blame live carelessly, because in these careless days critical opportunities will have slipped away irrecoverably; he will have drifted in his carelessness past some turning-point which he will not see again, and have missed the so-called chances that come no more.
But even this is only a part of the considerations that make our present life so precious; for this is only the outer aspect of it. What makes our time so critically short, whether we consider its intellectual or its moral and spiritual uses, is that our nature is so very sensitive, so easily marred by misuse, and spoilt irretrievably. The real brevity of the time at your disposal, whether for the training of your mind, or for your growth into the character of good men, consists in this, that deterioration is standing always at the back of any neglect or waste.
Deterioration is the inseparable shadow of every form of ignoble life.
“Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still.”