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Remember also thy Creator in the days of thy youth, or ever the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.—Ecc_12:1.
Ecclesiastes is never afraid to declare his belief that life is good and pleasant—parts, at least, of this life very pleasant indeed, and meant to be enjoyed. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun”; “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes.”
But he knew all the time that faith must be strengthened by all truth; that every single truth agrees with every other, while “no lie is of the truth,” and no lie can serve the truth. The world is good—good because God made it; but for us to live for this world only is not good, because this world will pass away, and we shall not, but shall have to be judged. He therefore speaks the words of the text in which he appeals to those who have life before them to remember God whatever else they forget.
“There is a polish for everything that taketh away rust; and the polish for the heart is the remembrance of God.” The companions said, “Is not fighting with the infidels also like this?” Lord Muhammad said, “No, although he fight until his sword be broken!”1 [Note: The Sayings of Muhammad (trans. by Al-Suhrawardy), 115.]
On a chalk hill in England there is a gigantic figure of a horse cut out on the green turf, allowing the white soil to be seen. This was an idol that was worshipped by our heathen ancestors. It was the white horse of Odin that was held in the deepest reverence all over the North of Europe. Provision was made for keeping the shape of this figure clear and distinct on the hill for all time coming. At stated intervals a grand ceremony took place, attended with much pomp, called “the Scouring of the White Horse,” which consisted in removing the weeds and grasses that had choked and obscured the white lines of the gigantic idol cut out on the hill-side.2 [Note: Hugh Macmillan, The Daisies of Nazareth, 70.]
1. “Remember.”—The word “remember” in the text is a word full of meaning. It tells us that we have not to do something new, but to keep in mind something that we have already known. We have not by searching to find out a God unknown to us, but to recall a God in whose image we were created, by whose grace we were redeemed, and for whose glory we were made. His likeness was at first stamped upon us, as truly as the portrait of the king is stamped upon the coin we use, and on the postage stamp we put upon our letter. In the most sinful and polluted nature traces of this Divine image can be detected. And what is wanted is that this Divine image in us, which sin has soiled and defaced, which the evil things of the world have grown over and hidden, shall be restored.
On 28th July, 1900, Westcott again addressed the Durham miners at their service in the Cathedral. In opening his address the Bishop said: “A great modern writer has said, ‘If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into this living busy world and see no reflexion of its Creator.’ It is a startling and terrible image. I know no more impressive one in literature, and have we not all felt something of the same kind? We look upon the life of men whom God has made in His own image, and expect to find everywhere tenderness, self-control, self-sacrifice, love in its thousand shapes; instead of this we are met on all sides by selfishness, self-indulgence, passion, carelessness of all things except the desire of the moment. As Cardinal Newman says, it is as if we looked into a mirror and did not see our face. If, indeed, what we see upon the surface were all, I do not think that life could be lived. But, thank God, it is not all. When a sudden crisis comes, commonplace men, men hitherto in no way distinguished from their fellows, prove themselves heroes. They hear in their own souls the voice of God, and without one thought lay down their lives to save their comrades. Your own work, your own experience, is fertile in acts of unlooked-for and unprepared self-devotion. Such deeds correct our first impressions. They show us the true man; and we rejoice. God has not left the world which He called into being, though He hide Himself, and if the eyes of our hearts are open we can see Him. We rejoice in the signs of a Divine nature.”1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, ii. 293.]
2. The remembrance of God should inspire youth with a sense of its responsibility and opportunity. The French have a saying, “If youth but knew and age had power.” It is almost a proverb, so deep and full of wisdom is its sad truth. If youth but knew that youth is their spring! If youth but knew that they are shaping the future! If youth but knew that it has opportunities that will never come again! Memory is in a peculiar sense the faculty of youth; and it is a wise contrivance of Him who formed us, that on our setting out in life we should be furnished with the means of laying in those stores of knowledge which we shall have to draw upon in future years. Youth is the time to make those impressions upon the mind, and to paint those scenes upon the imagination, which the eye of the soul will survey in after life, when it contemplates the objects and images which surround it in the world within.
I love above all other reading the early letters of men of genius. In that struggling, hoping, confident time the world has not slipped in with its odious consciousness, its vulgar claim of confidantship, between them and their inspiration. In reading these letters I can recall my former self, full of an aspiration which had not learned how hard the hills of life are to climb, but thought rather to alight down upon them from its winged vantage-ground. Whose fulfilment has ever come nigh the glorious greatness of his yet never-balked youth? As we grow older, art becomes to us a definite faculty, instead of a boundless sense of power. Then we felt the wings burst from our shoulders; they were a gift and a triumph, and a bare flutter from twig to twig seemed aquiline to us; but now our vans, though broader grown and stronger, are matters of every day. We may reach our Promised Land; but it is far behind us in the Wilderness, in the early time of struggle, that we have our Sinais and our personal talk with God in the bush.1 [Note: Letters of James Russell Lowell, i. 154.]
(1) It is in youth that we have the power to remember our Creator.—Our knowledge of God afterwards is ever tending to be of a different kind—a knowledge without love—in which our reason seems to go beyond our feelings, which does not interweave itself in our nature, and is certainly not, to the same degree, capable of moulding us to His will. In a few years we shall no more be able to make a free offering of our hearts to Him. We shall bring Him the waste of our power, the wreck of our lives. The world will have caught us in its toils; those natural gifts which seem in themselves not far from the Kingdom of Heaven will have passed away and been lost to us; the goods of this life will place themselves between us and heaven. If we ever looked upwards with any earnest thought or wish, if we ever remember to have felt assured in past times of a blessedness on those who believed, let us hold fast this thought, let us recall this image, because the time of promise is short and the evil days will soon come.
The period of gloom began with Newman’s enforced resignation of the editorship of the Rambler in 1859 and lasted till Kingsley’s attack on him in 1864. It was undoubtedly aggravated by a touch of morbidness brought on by ill-health. His state of mind in those years is recorded in a journal which he began to keep at this time—one of the literary treasures he has left—written as in the sight of God, with an utter simplicity and sincerity. The first entry [dated Dec. 15th, 1859] was written shortly after his failure as editor of the Rambler. “I know perfectly well, and thankfully confess to Thee, O my God, that Thy wonderful grace turned me right round when I was more like a devil than a wicked boy, at the age of fifteen, and gave me what by Thy continual aids I never lost. Thou didst change my heart, and in part my whole mental complexion at that time, and I never should have had the thought of such prayers as those which I have been speaking of above but for that great work of Thine in my boyhood. Still those prayers were immediately prompted, as I think, in great measure by natural rashness, generosity, cheerfulness, sanguine temperament, and unselfishness, though not, I trust, without Thy grace. I trust they were good and pleasing to Thee,—but I much doubt if I, my present self, just as I am, were set down in those past years, 1820 or 1822 or 1829, if they could be brought back, whether I now should make those good prayers and bold resolves, unless, that is, I had some vast and extraordinary grant of grace from Thy Heavenly treasure-house. And that, I repeat, because I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then it was in the freshness and fervour of youth. And this may be the ground of the grave warning of the inspired writer, ‘Memento Creatoris tui in diebus juventutis tuae, antequam veniat tempus afflictionis … antequam tenebrescat sol,’ ” etc.1 [Note: W. Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, i. 574.]
(2) It is in youth that we can offer a generous devotion of self.—It is easy to see how dishonourable it is to offer to God the blind and lame and sick instead of the healthy and vigorous part of our lives; yet we may feel it the more if we compare that which we sacrifice to God with what God sacrificed for us. What He gave up indeed, in coming down from heaven, we cannot possibly measure or understand; but look at His life after He was made Man, and there learn what is a true generous devotion of the best of self. Look at Him who was born in a stable on a winter night, that there might be no moment kept back from the work He had to do, that He might begin to suffer from the first; who worked unknown and unhonoured for thirty years, a poor man’s Son and a poor Man Himself, that He might know all the petty worrying cares of everyday life, as well as the great sufferings that it is noble and heroic to endure. He had very little time to take His pleasure in. The evil days came on Him very soon—days in which He had no pleasure, but in which His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; when the sun and the light was darkened, not in the heaven only, but in His soul, as He cried, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Indeed, He gives us more time to be happy in than He had Himself. Is His perfect life, His early death, a thing to be repaid with the shortest, latest, poorest days that we count that enough to offer Him?
The outline of the life of Jesus Christ, in all its human essentials, is that of a failure as complete as can be conceived; and yet the historic figure we know and think of stands out in all human essentials as a Conqueror. And, re-examining that life, in the light of its own standard, we shall see One who so truly overcame, both in Himself and in His influence, that nothing seems to yield such copious hint of the solution of life’s mystery as does His “failure.” His failure stands not in a loss of spirituality, but in the superabundance and intensity of it. The isolation of His Spirit did not result in a diminution of the ideal, any more than did disappointment sour, or poverty embitter, Him. The bare outline of His life is harsh and forbidding; it is that of a failure: but upon near approach, it is found to be lit by an inner light, and in the light of that personal life we see a form of wondrous beauty and commanding awe. In a word, the personality of Jesus Christ is as sublime a triumph as His life is supreme among failures.1 [Note: T. J. Hardy, The Gospel of Pain.]
(3) If we remember the Creator in our youth, He will remember us in our old age.—It cannot be truly said by an aged Christian, “I have no pleasure”; and though there may be “clouds,” he has also long and sunny intervals, and beyond this cloudy region he has blessed prospects. The peace which the Saviour gives to His people is a well of water springing up unto everlasting life; and there is nothing that keeps the feelings so fresh and youthful as a perennial piety. Compare that young sceptic, who has half persuaded himself into the disbelief of God and hereafter, and whose forced unbelief is often interrupted by intrusions of unwelcome conviction,—compare him with “Paul the aged” in prison, writing, “I know whom I have believed. I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand; I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth, there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.”
The biographies of two veterans appeared so simultaneously as almost to compel the contrast. Their declining days were somewhat similar. When getting old and feeling frail, they lost some of their dearest friends, and each lost his fortune. In these circumstances Sir Walter Scott writes, “The recollection of youth, health, and uninterrupted powers of activity, neither improved nor enjoyed, is a poor strain of comfort.… Death has closed the long dark avenue upon loves and friendships; and I look at them as through the grated door of a burial-place filled with monuments of those who were once dear to me, with no insincere wish that it may open for me at no distant period, provided such be the will of God. I shall never see the threescore-and-ten, and shall be summed up at a discount. No help for it, and no matter either.” Recovering from a similar slight illness, Wilberforce remarked, “I can scarce understand why my life is spared so long, except it be to show that a man can be as happy without a fortune as with one.” And then, soon after, when his only surviving daughter died, he writes, “I have often heard that sailors on a voyage will drink, ‘Friends astern,’ till they are half way over, then ‘Friends ahead.’ With me it has been ‘friends ahead’ this long time.”1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, iii. 215.]
Shortly after entering his ninety-fourth year, Dr. Martineau wrote to his friend Rev. W. Orme White: “In the romantic moods of early enthusiasm the fancy took me that half my present age would amply test even a slippery soul and might well limit our desire of an eligible probation. Am I not reasonably humbled, then, by being judged in need of detention for a doubled test? And if so, may I perhaps hopefully pray to be not unready for the change of worlds? I dare not affirm; I only know that duty and love look more Divine and the spiritual life more surely immortal than when I thought and spoke of them with less experience. The final mood of living Religion resolves itself for me into filial trust and undying aspiration. Here I can quietly rest, and in some small measure still actively work, till my call comes and takes me to other scenes.”2 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, ii. 245.]
Life! we’ve been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather.
’Tis hard to part when friends are dear,
Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear.
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not good-night, but in some happier clime,
Bid me good-morning.3 [Note: Mrs. Barbauld.]
(4) To remember God is power and joy all through life.—Tolstoy said a memorable thing when he wrote, “It is necessary to have a soul.” We cannot understand the world without a soul; we cannot understand ourselves without it. We cannot even make ourselves what we would like to be without attention to the inward part which we call soul. One of the first and greatest powers for the development of the soul is religion. That word denotes whatever binds us to God, or rather whatever binds us back to God. There is no time in life when religion should have greater power than in youth. Youths sometimes shrink from religion because they believe that it kills all the joy and brightness of life. If they have gathered that from the lives of those who are older, then they who are older have misrepresented it. Religion suffers from the fact that too often it is only when men have strayed into the far country that, in their misery, they say, “I will arise and go to my Father”; that is why religion has a gloomy and saddened look. Those who came late have memories of the bitterness of the past to sadden them. They only hope that they will be taken in as hired servants of the Father. We should look at religion through the lives of the few who have never strayed away, who gave their hearts to God when they were young, and live in the fulness of His love and grace.
Pathetic and melancholy are the words with which Mr. Frederic Harrison, the leader of English Positivism, ends his Autobiography: “I close this book with words that indeed resume in themselves all that I have ever written or spoken during half a century, which is this—that all our mighty achievements are being hampered and often neutralised, all our difficulties are being doubled, and all our moral and social diseases are being aggravated by this supreme and dominant fact—that we have suffered our religion to slide from us, and that in effect our age had no abiding faith in any religion at all. The urgent task of our time is to recover a religious faith as a basis of life both personal and social.”1 [Note: Frederic Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, ii. 333.]
3. Continual remembrance of God encourages the growth of the spirit. Man does not ripen naturally—that is, according to the course of his earthly nature—for eternity. He is the child of spiritual culture. By spiritual toil and effort only, by patience, by pain, by tears, can this crown of a good old age be won. It comes at the end of a good life-course, a course that has been aspiring and tending to God. It is the fruit of a continual renewing, the strengthening and unfolding of the inner man, which is not born of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of “the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever,” and “which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” And that nature needs close and constant culture; the weeds in its fields need to be cut down, and their very roots torn up, no matter what sensitive fibres may be lacerated in the process; while the seeds of the Kingdom, the germs which the good Sower has planted, have to be nurtured with many toils and tears, if in our old age we are to wear the look and bearing of men whose harvest has been reaped and is ready for gathering home into the garners of eternity.
No trace of the moroseness of old age appeared in Mr. Gladstone’s manners or his conversation, nor did he, though profoundly grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, and owning himself disappointed at the slow advance made by a cause dear to him, appear less hopeful than in earlier days of the general progress of the world, or less confident in the beneficent power of freedom to promote the happiness of his country. The stately simplicity which had always charmed those who saw him in private seemed more beautiful than ever in this quiet evening of a long and sultry day. His intellectual powers were unimpaired, his thirst for knowledge undiminished. But a placid stillness had fallen upon him and his household; and in seeing the tide of his life begin slowly to ebb, one thought of the lines of his illustrious contemporary and friend:
Such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.1 [Note: J. Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography, 458.]
Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel’s song, the poet’s lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden’s smile, or heavenly dream of art,
Stir the warm life-drops creeping round his heart—
Turn to the record where his years are told—
Count his grey hairs—they cannot make him old!2 [Note: Oliver Wendell Holmes.]
Blunt (J. J.), Plain Sermons, i. 424.
Brown (J. B.), Our Morals and Manners, 49.
Cooper (A. A.), God’s Forget-Me-Not, 1.
Garvie (A. E.), A Course of Bible Study for Adolescents, 115.
Hamilton (J.), The Royal Preacher, 215 (Works, iii. 207).
Jowett (B.), College Sermons, 1.
Macaskill (M.), A Highland Pulpit, 146.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Esther, etc., 391.
Macmillan (H.), The Daisies of Nazareth, 68.
Reid (J.), The Uplifting of Life, 214.
Shrewsbury (H. W.), Little Lumps of Clay, 67.
Simcox (W. H.), The Cessation of Prophecy, 201.
Whitefield (G.), Sermons, 143.
Woodward (H.), Sermons, 399.
Cambridge Review, iv. Supplement No. 81.
Christian World Pulpit, lxxii. 311 (W. S. Swanson); lxxviii. 101 (R. H. Wray).