Autumn days—when the flowers are over, and the harvest well-nigh gathered in, and the flush and the eagerness very far behind, and the strength and the vigour things also of the past:—I think they are sweet days to which to look forward amid life’s hurry and bustle, its excitement of laughter and tears. A very peaceful land, a land of Beulah, where repose seems to reign, and all seems “only waiting.” No more wild dreams, it is true, of what life is going to be, but then no sad wakings, and, lo, it was a dream! No more quick blood coursing in the veins, no more excess of animal life making stillness impossible and silence torture; no more young devotion and quick enthusiasm, warming the heart even to tinder, ready to flare at the first spark of friendship or love. No more glow of poetry cast about every face, and every daisy, and every sky, and every scene of every act of the coming years. No more expectation of becoming a great poet, a mighty warrior, an evangeliser of the world. And then no vigour to act, as when life went on; no leading the front of the battle, striking strong strokes for the right; no rejoicing in the strength that has now come, and that is still, still in its prime.
All that, and more, has passed away from life’s Autumn days. It was, perhaps, rather sad to feel these things departing; to notice growth first come to a standstill—and then, here and there the streak of Autumn, and the first yellow leaves stealing down. To find the years so short, instead of so long; to lose the wonder and the thrill at the first snowdrop, the first cowslip; the first nest low in the bushes with five blue eggs; the first excursion round the park wall for violets, or into the wood for nuts. To lose the glow of early love, the despair of early disappointment, the vigour of early intention and action; and to mellow down into a half-light, undisturbed by any of those violent lights and shadows. It was, I say, perhaps rather sad to feel these things departing.
But now they have gone, and the Autumn days have come, and the heart has settled down to this state of things, and is content that it should be so. It is better, far better, the old man sees, to be in the Autumn of life, though he yet thinks tenderly, lovingly, of those young days in the impetuous, over-blossomed Spring. The “visionary gleam” has left his sky. But a truer, if a quieter lustre has arisen in it and abides. “There hath passed a glory from the earth.” But the glory has been transferred to Heaven. It was sad, at first, when the glamour, and the magic, and the glow, passed away from this world, which, to youth’s heart seemed so exceedingly, inexpressibly glorious and fair. But it is better so. A mirage gave, indeed, a certain sweet mysterious light to life’s horizon, and he could not but feel dashed at first to find little but bare sand where the unreal brightness had been. But he journeyed on, learning, somewhat sadly, in manhood, God’s loving lesson, that we are strangers and pilgrims upon earth, that we have no continuing city here, not love, nor fame, nor wealth, nor power; none of these could, even had we attained it, prove a City of Rest: we must still journey on before we can sit down satisfied. And God’s true servant, in his Autumn days, has learned not to miss nor to mourn over youth’s mirage. Nay, his future has “no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it. For the glory of God doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.”
He looks at the sky, which is certainly darkening, because life’s one-day sun is going down. But, the lower it sinks, the less he laments it, for he finds that it did indeed hide from him the vast tracts of Infinity, and close him in, by its light, in a small low-ceiled room. Oh quiet days of peace and reverence and mild serenity; the rocking waves of the passions asleep about the tossed heart, and the glittering thoughts of heaven reflected instead from the calm soul; and its speechless infinite depths gradually mirroring themselves in the being! Happy days, when life’s feverish, exciting novel is closed, and we are just reading quietly for an hour in the Book of peace, before the time comes for us to go off to bed! Happy days; when God Himself is striking off one by one the fetters and manacles of earth, and will soon send His Angel to open for us the last iron gate of earth’s prison!
How thankful we should be, as we grow into the Autumn, for those kind words which assure us that life’s beginning, not life’s end, is then really near; that it is but the bud of immortal youth that is pushing off those withered leaves of mortality; for those who have given the year of their life to God; or, at least (such is His mercy in Christ Jesus), the earnest gleaning of its late months. For else, how sad to watch the sun setting, the only sun we know of, and to hope for no long day beyond. Think of what a wise heathen said of old age. Cicero wrote a treatise, a wonderfully beautiful treatise, in praise of it. But all this was but playing with his own sadness, in his old age; pleading the cause of a client, in whose cause he did not believe. For, after all, he writes his real thought to his friend Atticus. “Old age,” he says, “has embittered me—my life is spent.” Sad, yet true from his point of view. Sad—all spent; and no good hope of a “treasure in the heavens that faileth not.” How even one of the little ones in our village schools could have cheered up sad Cicero!
Now see what Christianity can do, and has done. Think of waiting Simeon:
“Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,
According to Thy word:
For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.”
Hear aged Paul, the great champion Apostle, leaning now on his sword, and exhorting the younger warriors who are leading on that war, that he soon must leave. What peace, nay, what exultation, flashes through his waiting!
And a picture arises before us of another aged, very aged man, ending the Bible and his life with the solemn rapturous words of glowing expectation—