Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

clear vibration, the recovery from illness is slow and partial. And thus there dawns on us a sense of mortality peculiarly real. The tables are turned with us. Heretofore life, the world, the body, all have been for us; now they are against us, they are failing us; the shadow of our doom begins to creep upon us.

How real this experience is every thoughtful person of years well knows. It has in it, I verily believe, more bitterness than death itself. It is the secret of the sadness of age. And there is every reason why this experience should be sad. It is necessarily so until we can meet it with some larger truth and fact. No philosophy can meet, no force of will can outmaster it, no mere habit of cheer can hold its own against it. It is a fact, and cannot be reasoned away, and as the stern law of decay holds on its course, the force of will and the smile of cheer die out by slow or rapid degrees.

"Whatever poet, orator, or sage

May say of it, old age is still old age."

--

It is a horrible fact, and it cannot be anything less, as this cheerful poet is forced to say, this fact of loss and decay. It may be unmanly not to endure it, but it is not unmanly to see and feel it as it is. But even manly endurance itself fails as the process goes on, and the powers of body and mind shrink towards nothingness. We are not now dealing with sentiment, but with the hardest of facts. The common appeal is to a spirit of cheer, to force of will, for courage to the last, to go down with the flag flying, and the like. This is indeed sentiment,

but no philosopher, no physiologist, will use it; they know that the will and courage are involved in this process. The mind stands with one foot on the body. However it may be with it as an entity, its working energies flow out in the same wasting current as those of the body. As this stage of existence draws on, the question is forced upon us,Is there no shield against this evil? Is there nothing left for us but brute-like endurance, or some phantom-show of cheer and will, nothing but sentiments that are bound up in the dissolving process, and that necessarily come to an end when most needed?

Along with this decadence of powers comes a greater evil, -an apprehension of finiteness. In our years of wholeness and strength there is no such apprehension. Life carries with it a mighty affirmation of continuance, but when life weakens it begins to doubt itself. But the idea of coming to an end is intolerable; it does not suit our nature or feelings; it throws us into confusion; we become a puzzle to ourselves; we cannot get our life into any order or find for it any sufficient motive or end, and so it turns into a horrible jest, unless we can ground ourselves on some other conception. But the sense of finiteness presses on us with increasing force; it seems to outmaster the infinite, and even to assert its mastery in the process at work within us. This process has come to wear a scientific cast, and seems to claim the endorsement of science. We are kept alive by the action of two laws, - the vital and the chemical. Physical life is the result

[ocr errors]

Over

of the struggle between the two, the vital building up, the chemical tearing down, constant waste, constant repair. Were the latter to cease, death would shortly follow. Silently, ceaselessly the two forces work in perpetual antagonism, life weaving in its mysterious loom the cell-tissue that makes up the human fabric, - how we cannot tell, science cannot unravel the process. All we can say is, that it must be the hand of creative Life himself that holds the threads, and throws the shuttle. against it is the busy destroyer-oxygen-burning up the life-woven tissue steadily, relentlessly. For years the vital force is stronger and weaves faster than its enemy can destroy. But at last, somewhere in mid-life, the forces are equal. Then the chemical gains on the vital, and pulls down faster than the other builds up. We die simply because chemical force triumphs over vital force, because the law of destruction is stronger than the law of life, because the finite outmasters what seemed infinite. Does it outmaster it or not? That is the question. It is here that we need a shield to interpose against the horrible suggestions of this last battle of life. And it is just here that God offers himself as such a shield, God himself in all the personality of his being, — the I Am, Existence. The name itself is an argument; existence is in question, and here is Existence itself saying to a mortal man, "I am your shield." Must not the protection bear a relation to the Being who protects? God is behind and in this battle that seems won by death. One side is plain enough.

The chemist can tell us all about it,

how oxygen

tears down, but he can tell us nothing of how life builds up. The Sphinx, staring upon the Nubian sands, is not more dumb than he when he stands before life weaving its tissue. There is a power and a principle present that he cannot detect or measure, and never will; the mystery of being is insolvable; eternity will not give us the key. If he is logical he will not attempt to draw conclusions as to the destiny of man when there is an unknown. element in the problem. If this unseen Power sees fit to weave the fleshly fabric in a finite way, we need not conclude that the life itself shares the fate of the apparent web. With an omnipotent Weaver weaving a fabric made up of finite threads, and also of incomprehensible threads, spun and drawn out of his own being, it is not necessary to believe that when the finite are dissolved, the others also are dissolved. Their entire relation is that of antagonism, may they not be diverse in their destiny? They were originally brought together, how we do not know, may they not be separated, how we cannot understand; but one mystery is not greater than the other. One is a fact, the other may be and has its analogy to support it. We may rest in the conclusion that if God has had a hand in the making of us, his work will endure. Between ourselves longing for life, and this devouring sense of finiteness, stands God—a shield. "I made you,' He says, "but you shall not perish because I put you into a perishing body. Because I made you you cannot perish. Because I am the ever-living God you shall live also."

[ocr errors]

3. God is a shield against the calamities of life. It is rarely that one gets far on in life without seeing many times when it is too hard to be borne. Take ordinary, average life, I hardly see how men stand up under it. Take a life like that of so many around us, where only one pair of hands is all there is between the family and starvation, with the chances of sickness or no work. Ah! "the simple annals of the poor" are not cheerful reading. Or, take the every-day catastrophes, loss of property, little children, or wife, or husband, swept away by death; take the life-long sorrows, the drunken son, the daughter gone to shame, the marriage that has turned into disgust, it is not easy to walk steady through the years with such burdens on one. Consider, also, how hopes die out, how life with most settles into a dull ache of disappointment, what multitudes carry about secret sorrows, and how, for most of us, the life that was to be so free, and glad, and prosperous, has turned into a treadmill of toil or dull routine of trifles. I confess I see little life that is of itself rewarding, little life that pays as it goes. There are few who can say with Walter Scott, "sat est vixisse," it is enough "it to have lived. For vast multitudes life is unutterably sad and bitter, for many others it is dull and insipid, for others one long disappointment, for none is it its own reward. It will always wear this aspect to the sensitive and the thoughtful unless some other element or power is brought in. Man cannot well face life without some shield between. He may fight ever so bravely, but the spears of life

« ElőzőTovább »