is perishable, but that every unreal thing is perishable. Stage scenery is unreal scenery. It does not represent the actual facts of the greenroom. Many an actor is bringing down the house with laughter when his own heart is breaking. St. Paul saw that a great deal of life is simply stage acting-concealment of the greenroom. How many kind things are spoken, not in order to reveal, but in order to cover! How many gifts are sent, not for your sake, but for the sake of the donor! How many blandishments are lavished for a vote! How many visits are paid for a subscription! St. Paul says all this unreality will pass away. When will it pass away? At death, you say. No; death does not reveal the reality of life. Death does not tear away the mask from the face of my brother. Death is itself a mask, itself an unreality. So far from causing the stage scenery to vanish, it is itself the climax of illusion. It is not to death I look; it is to love. Love is the great dispeller of unreality. Love is the great emancipator from stage scenery. Love is the true rending of the veil between this world and the world to come.1 2. No doubt the world itself will pass away. For that we have the warrant of Scripture, and Science has countersigned the warrant. But this warrant is not to be found here. St. Paul is not predicting a future catastrophe; he is announcing a present fact. He does not affirm that "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" of this familiar world, yea, the solid globe itself, with all who inherit it, shall dissolve, and like the baseless fabric of a vision, like an insubstantial pageant faded, "leave not a rack behind." He affirms a fact with which we are more immediately concerned, namely, that the fashion, the form, the whole outward aspect, of the world in which we live fades, changes, passes, while we look upon it; that it is now, and always, passing away and from this fact he infers the immense importance of fixing our affections and placing our aims, not on the outward show, the frail and shifting forms of things, but on the sacred and enduring realities which lie beneath and behind them. There are two ways in which it is true that the fashion of this world is passing away. (1) First it is true with respect to all the things by which we are surrounded.—It is only in poetry-the poetry of the Psalms for example-that the hills are called "everlasting." Go to the 1 G. Matheson. side of the ocean which bounds our country, and watch the tide going out, bearing with it the sand which it has worn from the cliffs; the very boundaries of our land are changing; they are not the same as they were when these words were written. Every day new relationships are forming around us; new circumstances are calling upon us to act, to act manfully, firmly, decisively, and up to the occasion, remembering that an opportunity once gone is gone for ever. Indulge not in vain regrets for the past, in vainer resolves for the future; act, act in the present. The difference between the ancient and the modern world is this: in the one the great reality of being was now; in the other it is yet to come. If you would witness a scene characteristic of the popular life of old, you must go to the amphitheatre of Rome, mingle with its 80,000 spectators, and watch the eager faces of Senators and people; observe how the masters of the world spend the wealth of conquest, and indulge the pride of power; see every wild creature that God has made, from the jungles of India to the mountains of Wales, from the forests of Germany to the deserts of Nubia, brought hither to be hunted down in artificial groves by thousands in an hour; behold the captives of war, noble perhaps and wise in their own land, turned loose, amid yells of insult more terrible for their foreign tongue, to contend with brutal gladiators trained to make death the favourite amusement, and present the most solemn of individual realities as a wholesale public sport; mark the light look with which the multitude, by uplifted finger, demands that the wounded combatant be slain before their eyes; notice the troop of Christian martyrs awaiting hand in hand the leap from the tiger's den; and, when the day's spectacle is over and the blood of two thousand victims stains the ring, follow the giddy crowd as it streams from the vomitories into the street, trace its lazy course into the forum, and hear it there scrambling for the bread of private indolence doled out by the purse of public corruption; and see how it suns itself to sleep in the open ways, or crawls into foul dens till morning brings the hope of games and merry blood again;-then you have an idea of that Imperial people, with their passionate living for the moment, which the Gospel found in occupation of the world. And if, on the other hand, you would fix in your thought an image of the popular mind of Christendom, I know not that you could do better than go at sunrise with the throng of toiling men to the hillside where Whitefield or Wesley is about to preach. Hear what a great heart of reality is in that hymn which swells upon the morning air-a prophet's strain upon a people's lips! See the rugged hands of labour, clasped and trembling, wrestling with the Unseen in prayer! Observe the uplifted faces, deep-lined with hardship and with guilt, streaming now with honest tears, and flushed with earnest shame, as the man of God awakes the life within, and tells of Him that bare for us the stripes and cross, and offers the holiest spirit to the humblest lot, and tears away the veil of sense from the glad and awful gates of heaven and hell. Go to these people's homes, and observe the decent tastes, the sense of domestic obligations, the care for childhood, the desire for instruction, the neighbourly kindness, the conscientious self-respect, and say whether the sacred image of duty does not live within those minds; whether holiness has not taken the place of pleasure in their idea of life: whether for them too the toils of nature are not lightened by some external hope, and their burden carried by some angel of love, and the strife of necessity turned into the service of God. The present tyrannizes over their character no more, subdued by a future infinitely great; and hardly though they lie upon the rock of this world, they can live the life of faith; and while the hand plies the tools of earth, keep a spirit open to the skies.1 (2) Again, this is true with respect to ourselves." The fashion of this world passeth away" in us. The feelings we have now are not those which we had in childhood. There has passed away a glory from the earth-the stars, the sun, the moon, the green fields have lost their beauty and significance-nothing remains as it was, except their repeated impressions on the mind, the impressions of time, space, eternity, colour, form; these cannot alter, but all besides has changed. Our very minds alter. There is no bereavement so painful, no shock so terrible, but time will remove or alleviate it. The keenest feeling in this world time wears out at last, and our minds become like old monumental tablets which have lost the inscription once graven deeply upon them. Jesus (on whom be peace!) said, "The world is a bridge; pass over it, but do not build upon it."-Inscription on a bridge at Fatehpur Sikri 2 Perhaps no one has pictured with truer hand the changing fashion of the world in the passing of human life than Long2 Field, A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 97. 1 James Martineau. fellow in his poem, "The Old Clock on the Stairs," in which he tells us that Through days of sorrow and of mirth, Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood, Never-for ever!" In that mansion used to be His great fires up the chimney roared; There groups of merry children played, Never-for ever!" From that chamber, clothed in white, The dead lay in his shroud of snow; All are scattered now and fled, Some are married, some are dead; And when I ask, with throbs of pain, Never-for ever!" |