DEATH-BEDS.
Another seeks joy in friendship, or in beautiful human affection. DEATH-BEDS. But remorseless death comes: he strikes down the object to which affection clings; and where is the bereaved one now? He is well-nigh wearying for the grave, and so of all that begins and ends on earth: its blossom goes up like rottenness at last. It is simply impossible that any object whose root is in the dust can gladden the soul of man, apart from the God who made it.
Has God, then, left us without joy? When we became idolaters, did he leave us to our idols, to tears, and woe? Nay, there is blessedness even here below; and the knowledge, the fear, the love, and favour of God, is its fountain-head. In reconciliation to Him—in His image restored—in growing holiness—in greater and yet greater love and likeness to the Saviour of the soul—the man of God, the man who is truly rational, finds the streams of his joy. God himself is the fountain; but his blessings are the rills which flow from it: and he who has not felt this joy, is still living among shadows, and phantoms, and names. His is only the comb rifled of the honey; his is the dream without the reality; his the corruption and the death of sin, without the pleasures which flow from God into the soul.—Is the land of his fathers a source of joy to the returning exile? Is the breath of spring a source of gladness to man’s fevered brow? Is the face of nature a source of pleasure to him who has long been immured amid the damps of a dungeon? Far more than all these together, is a sense of God’s favour to the soul which has returned from its wanderings, to seek its blessedness again on the bosom of its God.
VOLTAIRE.
And it is to godliness, or at least some counterfeit of it, that all, or nearly all, men flee for joy at last. Some, indeed, die like the beasts that perish, without either fear or joy. Conscience is dead before the body. It occasions no alarm; and such men pass into the presence of the Judge perhaps denying his very existence. But not so all. When conscience is aroused from its long stupor by the nearness of death, how eager do some appear for the joy which religion promises! how gladly would they now grasp at what they have practically despised, perhaps for threescore years and ten! VOLTAIRE. There is one who has spent a lifetime in denying the truth as it is in Jesus. He declared that he hated the Saviour’s very name, and did all that wit and powers the most diversified could accomplish to blot it from the hearts and memories of men. That man hated the truth with a perfect hatred, and gloried in his hatred; it secured for him the applause of myriads who felt that truth to be fettering, and who rejoiced in the help of one so gifted in their attempt to banish it from the earth.—But that man is dying at last, and all is changed now. Goaded by conscience, he flees to a poor superstition—he tries to soothe his soul by believing one of the most enormous impositions ever practised upon man. He eats what he reckons, or what an abject superstition teaches him to regard as “the body, the blood, and the divinity” of Him whom he had so long blasphemed and denied; and that very superstition of that dying infidel[41] tells where it is that man finds or tries to find his joy after all. It is just an infidel’s method of proclaiming, “Godliness has the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”
Or if we refer to a case less extreme than that of an avowed infidel, the same truth appears—the same lesson is taught. God and his favour alone can gladden or satisfy the soul.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
SIR
WALTER
SCOTT. Another man, then, not less distinguished in his day than Voltaire, is passing on to his great account. Millions in many lands have admired his genius, and offered incense to his name. Wherever he moves he is followed by applauding crowds; and if ever there was one who might have been satisfied with the homage of his fellow-mortals, that was the man. Princes deemed themselves honoured by being under his roof. Royalty set him at its right hand. He added field to field. He determined to make for himself a local habitation, as he had already made for himself a name; and his mansion, once modest and humble, grew into “a romance in stone.”
But the fashion of this world vanishes away, and that man must die. Before he leaves the scenes which his presence had long invested with smiles, he must read a lesson to man—had man a heart to learn it—more salutary and profound than any he had ever tried to teach. The wind of adversity blew, and shattered his fortunes and his hopes together. Death entered his abode, and one who had long been its joy was carried to the tomb. Then affliction laid its hand upon himself. The body was palsied, the mind a wreck; and amid all this, that man’s spasmodic efforts to resume his former self, rank among the most touching incidents in the chequered history of humanity. But we must listen to his own words to learn his tale of woe, and see how broken is every earthly cistern when man seeks joy from it apart from God; how shadowy and dream-like is every earthly thing apart from Him who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
SORROW UNSOOTHED.