S. THE CERTAIN END.

THE CERTAIN END.

Then cometh the end. — 1 Corinthians 15:24.

It is not possible to rule these words out of life. They are perpetually recurring. You tell of any process; you trace out how it is going to work on from step to step; you see how cause opens into effect and then effect, becoming cause, opens into still further effect beyond, — but always, by and by, your thought comes to a stoppage and a change. The process is exhausted. "Then cometh the end." Your story has to round itself with that.

We look into a child’s face and imagine the life which he will live. We see him growing up from childhood into manhood; all the works that he will do, all the truths that he will learn, all the associations that he will form, roll out their length before us: we let our eye run along their course; but at last we must reach the point where, "Then cometh the end," sums up and closes all.

You start upon a new business, you build you a new house, you set on foot some new measure of public policy, you begin some new study, you enter some new school, — whatever you do, however long are the anticipations of what you undertake, there is where they all arrive at last. "Then cometh the end," is written, however far away, as the conclusion which all must reach. And if we go far out beyond the little reach of our own personal affairs, still it is the same. Our text is telling us of Christ. Here is the great work which He is doing, conquering death, redeeming men from sin, claiming the world for God; but even of His work it is written, " Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. " Even the great redemptive work of Christ must someday be folded up and finished, and some new dispensation, some longer expression of the life of God upon the life of men must come to take its place. This constant recurrence of ends and finishing places in life must certainly mean something. It may beget a mere frivolity. It may make it seem as if nothing were worth beginning very earnestly or prosecuting very thoroughly. "What is the use?" a man may say. "If everything I do, every bit of work I undertake, is to be hurried up and tossed aside for a new work, if my whole life is some morning to be rounded off where that morning happens to find it, and the poor-finished, unfinished thing is to be flung into the basket, and another life is to be set up on these spindles of circumstances where mine is whirling now, what is the use? Why should I be thoughtful? Why should I be serious? Let me eat, drink, and be merry,"

Another man gets out of precisely the same state of things a totally different impression. This quick, sharp beat in life, this constant coming round to where the shears cut off the work, and where if it is not done it has to stay undone forever, this perpetual ripening of processes which makes the seed-time of new processes beyond, this constant ending and beginning, gives a freshness and vitality to living which is exhilarating and delightful. It seems to be always bringing life back to report itself to its first principles and fundamental motives. It is forever breaking up routines and starting things anew. It demands briskness and promptness. "Now or never you must do this thing, "it seems to say," for in a few moments the chance is over and then cometh the end."

Let us think of this characteristic of life and try to see what it means. Let us see what sort of temper and spirit it ought to produce, — this law of life that all things come to an end, that only by perpetual stoppage and re-starting is motion kept up, only by perpetual perishing is life maintained. And we may begin by noting this, — which is the most striking thing about the whole matter, — the way in which men’s desire and men’s dread are both called out by this constant coming of the ends of things. The human soul, as I have been saying, at once delights in and shudders at this perpetual finishing and re-beginning, this stopping and re-starting of the works of life.

Look first at man’s desire of the end. It is, in the most superficial aspect of it, a part of his dread of monotony. There is something very pathetic, it seems to me, in man’s instinctive fear of being wearied with even the most delightful and satisfactory of all the experiences which he meets with in the world. Is it not a sign, one of the many signs, of man’s sense that his nature is made for larger worlds than this, and only abides here temporarily and in education for destinies which shall be more worthy of its capacities? The friendship which seems to give you all that your heart requires, the occupation which seems to call out all your powers, the opinions which embody your whole present view of truth, — all of these, if you come to be more than you are now, must fail you, and prove insufficient. Even this earthly life itself, delightfully rich and various as it is, deep has been the instinct in the human heart which has felt that it would be a terrible thing to have it last forever. "I would not live alway," has been a true cry of the human soul. The wandering Jew, compelled to live on until the Saviour came again, has been one of the most fearful figures which have haunted the imagination of mankind. Man’s mere dread of monotony, his sense of the awful weariness of living forever, has always made him rejoice that, far off but still in sight, down the long avenues of living, he could read the inscription of release, " Then cometh the end." But this is the most superficial aspect of it. There is something deeper in man’s desire to anticipate an end than this. Very early in every experience there comes the sense of imperfection and failure in what we have already done, and the wish that it were possible to begin the game again. There is a curious phenomenon that often takes us by surprise as it comes just in the full freshness of the new human life: The young man of twenty in his newly undertaken work or in his college-room breaks out in pessimistic railing at the misery and unsatisfactoriness of life. He sings great psalms of misery and disappointment. We laugh at that sometimes, and call it foolish affectation. It seems to be a feeble effort to create or imagine an experience which does not exist. No doubt that element is in it, and that is worthy of our laughter; but something else is in it also. The cry of the boy of twenty that life is too long, that the end is far away, that there are weary years to travel before the end is reached, — that cry does not come from very deep down in the soul. The soul is really full of joy in life, of gladness in the abundant days and in the years of bounteous promise; but this cry, so far as it is real, means the beginning of satisfaction in the fact that there is an end. Already there are some things in life which the soul would fain get out of life. The first sketch has so marred the canvas that the perfect picture seems impossible. And as life goes on to more than twenty that conviction grows. The cry may not be uttered as it was at first. The habit of living gets to be so strong that men do not think so much about the end, but the expectation of it and the comfort of the expectation of it are still there. Tell any man that he, out of all these mortals, was never to die, that there was to be no end for him, and, whatever might be his first emotion, by and by must come something like dismay; for every man has gathered something which he must get rid of, something which he would not carry always, and so there is promise to him when it is prophesied, "Then cometh the end." But it is not only the sense of the evil element in life that makes men think with satisfaction of the coming end. So far as life has been a success and developed its better power, the same satisfaction comes. It is a poor and pathetic and desperate thing for a traveler along a dreary and difficult road to look forward to where the road evidently takes a sharp turn into the mountains and say to himself, "Thank God, there is an end to this! Thank God, the new road which I cannot see cannot be worse than this which I am travelling now!" But for a man to say, "This road is glorious, but I am glad to see that it stops yonder; for no doubt beyond is something yet more glorious still," that is a fine impatience. The noblest human natures are built thus, with such a consciousness of their own capacity, with such a feeling of eternity, with such an assurance of the richness of living, that all the best which they enjoy and see and are, becomes suggestive and prophetic. Perfectly satisfied with it for the present, the moment that you shut down the curtain on it and said, "That is all," the color would be gone, the exhilaration and splendor would have vanished. But let the life be filled with the spirit of the springtime. Let the voice in its heart always keep saying to it, "You are to go on filling yourself with vitality and joy, day after day, month after month, and then cometh the end, then cometh the end;" and then it is not a cessation of life but fuller life which the heart expects. The end which comes to the promise of springtime shall be the luxuriance of summer! And so in many tones, yet all of them tones of satisfaction, men desire the end. Sometimes it is pathetic, sometimes it is triumphant, but, either way, it rejoices in this arrangement of life by which things do not move on in unbroken processes to their results, but there are always endings and beginnings. It is like a great company of travellers coming together in sight of the resting-place where they are to spend the night, and lifting up all together one great shout of joy. Their hearts have various feelings. Some are glad because their day’s task is done, others are glad because of the new task which, standing on this summit of attainment, they can see opening out beyond them for to-morrow; but all are glad. The end to which they are coming meets their desire. But now, with all this full in our sight, turn to the other side and think of the dread with which men think of the coming of ends in life. There can be no doubt that such dread does come to men when those changes are prophesied which are always sure to be waiting in the distance. Indeed the general sense of the changefulness of things is what sends such a pervasive sense of insecurity through all our ordinary living. Let that be taken away, let the dread of change be driven out from this half -conscious possession which it holds on all we do and think and say, and it would be as if a dull and threatening day had cleared up into sunshine. The birds would burst out into song, and every twig upon the trees would quiver into bud and blossom. Can we give any account of this dread which thus haunts the very feature of life which, as we have seen, wakens also the almost enthusiastic desire of men’s souls? We can at least see what some of its elements are. The first of them is almost too dull and mechanical to give any account of itself, while, at the same time, it is very real. It is the sheer force of habit. It is the inertia of life. That this which is should cease to be is shocking and surprising. Let it continue. Let there be no disturbance. So the soul shrinks from change. So it shudders as, far away, it hears the murmur of the sea whose shores it must reach at last and end its journey and embark on something new.

Even in that dread of inertia there is something which is good. It is good for the tree to love the soil in which it grows and to consent with difficulty to transplanting, and not to have a restless habit of skipping constantly from field to field. It is good that the burden of proof should be on the side of change. But there is something more than this mere force of habit. I think that very often one shrinks from the announcement of the coming end of the condition in which he is now living because, when he hears it, he becomes aware how far he is from having yet exhausted the condition in which he is now living. A boy has longed to be a man, but when he stands upon the brink of manhood and looks behind him over the yet unreaped acres of his youth, he is almost ready to go back and postpone his manhood till he has taken richer possession of those harvest-fields. The scholar-period of some man’s life is over, and the working days are ready to begin. How many students have stood and gazed back over the calm days of books, and hated the thought of going out and leaving all the stores of learning which were lying there unlearned. And so of the great end, — the mighty change. Who wants to die so long as this great rich world has only had the very borders of its riches touched, so long as the fountains are springing everywhere of the mere overflow of one or two of which only our lips have drunk? This is no slight tie to life, no small element in the dread of death, — this sense of the unexhausted richness of the life we leave. But even more than this, perhaps, comes in the great uncertainty which envelops every experience which is untried. The great mystery of the unlived is a strong element in our dread of change. Your friend may tell you everything about it, but you cannot really know any experience till you have passed through it yourself. The passage from light into light must be always through a zone of darkness. How we are feeling this in these days in which we live! Old social conditions are ceasing to be possible any longer. In their place new ones are evidently coming, which, when they shall have come, we know will be more just and happy and humane than those which we have known so long; but who that feels this most deeply is not conscious of misgiving and of dread as he enters with his time into the cloud of disturbance that hovers between the old and the new? Whenever a great public policy has exhausted itself and must be exchanged for a broader and a better, it is not mere blind conservatism, it is the true sense that in the untried ways must lie unguessed dangers that makes every wise man, however determined he may be, pause in a momentary dread and hesitate a second — and, if he be a real servant of God, pray for new grace — before he cuts loose from the familiar shore, and sails out on to the untried seas. We dread the end even of that condition whose imperfectness we know by sad experience. This is a large part of the reason why the most miserable cling to life, counting it better —

"to bear the ills they have
Than flee to others which they know not of."

Thus we recount our human lot, and see man standing in desire and in dread, at once, of this perpetual change, this perpetual coming of the end of things. Blessed indeed it is for man, standing in such confused and mingled mood, that the end of things does not depend upon his choice, but comes by a will more large, more wise than his. If we ourselves had to give the signal when each experience would close; if the boy must say when he had been boy long enough, and summon the man’s responsibilities to gather out of the vague world and rest upon him; if our own hand must be put forth to disturb the settled peace, and waken confusion and perplexity; if at last we must with our own finger give the sign that the time had come for the mortal to put on immortality, — how the desire and the dread would fight within us! In large part we are spared all that. The workman’s voice has not to summon out of the east the shadows of the night in which no man can work. "It comes of itself," we say. We mean, and when we speak with perfect reverence and truth, we say, "God sends it."

God sends it! And when we do indeed say that, does there not come at once some sort of larger light into this mixed condition, this double attitude of man toward the changefulness of life of which we have been speaking? That thing which man thus alternately, and sometimes even simultaneously, desires and dreads, if we consider it only with reference to man, is all confusion. We can make nothing of it. Who can say whether it be good or evil, blessing or curse, wisdom or blunder, — this perpetual hurrying of all things to their end? But if around this instability of human life is wrapped the great permanence of the life of God; if no end comes which is not in His sight truly a beginning; nay, if the whole element of time is so lost in His eternity that not the beginning and the ending of experiences but their spiritual relations to our growing characters is everything, — then is there not light upon it all? To value everything which comes to me, and yet to know that not its form but its spiritual essence is really valuable, therefore to hasten while I have it to get out of it what it has to give me, and to even rejoice that someday in the loss of its formal presence I shall be able to make myself completely sure of the possession of its spirit, — that is the true attitude of the soul toward every good thing that God gives, — health, friends wealth, learning, life. But that true attitude the soul cannot keep toward them all unless they all mean God, come by His gift, and are instinct with His spiritual intention.

How many things there are of which we say, "I thank God I may do this, but I thank God also that the time will come when I shall stop doing this and do it no longer." The business in which we engage to earn our bread, the slight associations and partnerships which we make for special purposes with our fellow-men, the journeys which we undertake, the schools in which we spend our years of study, the houses which we build to live in, — all these are of this sort. They are good and welcome because they are but for a while. Our mortal life, that too we are thankful for, but thankful also that it shall not last forever. But all this satisfaction in the temporariness comes only from its being enfolded and embraced within the eternity of the eternal. There must be something which does not pass away, something to which comes no end. The soul and its character, God and His love and glory, — it is because within these as the ends of life all other things are enfolded as the means of life, that we can be reconciled to, nay, even can rejoice in the knowledge that the means must cease when they shall have made their contribution to the end which must endure forever. But to know no everlasting end or purpose, to have nothing but the means to rest on, to see them slipping out of our grasp and leaving nothing permanent behind, — that is terrible!

How is it with you, oh, my friend? There comes an end to all these things which you are doing now! Not because God snatches them out of your hands, but because they exhaust themselves and expire, because they are by their nature temporary and perishing, they die. You follow out any of them a little way and you come to this inevitable epitaph of their mortality, "Then Cometh the end." How is it then with you? Have you anything which is not perishable? Have you anything to which there comes no end? "What?" you say; "what sort of thing?" And I reply, "Any passion for character and love of God!" Those are eternal. There comes no end to those. You may change your dress, your name, your habits, your companionships, your work, — everything that you do, — but your passion for character and love for God, if you have them, you never change; they are the same forever. New temptations spring out of new soil, and the old hatred of sin leaps on its feet to fight them. New chances of goodness start up in some completely novel life, and the old eagerness for goodness cries out and claims them for its own. There is no end to the great ends of life. If one is living in the resolute pursuit of them, he may first welcome, and then rejoice to leave behind the several means which in succession come to offer him their help toward the attainment of those ends, as the traveler whose heart is set upon some distant city rejoices when he comes to, and then rejoices when he gets beyond, each field and river which must be crossed before he enters the far-off city-gates. A noble independence this gives to a man’s soul. Poverty comes up and joins you, and you say, "Welcome, Poverty. We will walk together for a while, and when I have done with you, when you have done for me all that you can, then you shall go. I will dismiss you with my thanks. "Riches comes rolling up to be your fellow-traveler, and you say," Welcome, Riches. There will come an end to you; but while you last we will be friends, and you shall help me." Men praise you and you accept their praise as, when you are sailing in a ship, you accept a wind which will not last forever, but which while it lasts may fill your sails and speed you on your way. Men blame you, and you take their blame and bid it make you humble that you may be more strong, because more trustful of a greater than yourself when the sunshine comes again. The more your soul is set upon the ends of life, the more you use its means in independence. You use them as a workman uses his tools, taking them up in quick succession, casting them down one after the other, never falling in love with the tool because the work possesses him.

To-day, upon Palm Sunday, Jesus comes riding into Jerusalem in the midst of palm-branches and hosannas. Next Thursday, He is prostrate in Gethsemane. Next Friday, He is hanging on the Cross. Next Sunday, He is rising from the tomb. The great experiences come quick on one another. Joy crowds on sorrow, sorrow presses on the steps of joy. To each comes the quick end. Each is but born before it dies. But one thing never dies, — the service of His Father, the salvation of the world, the sum and substance of His life! Set upon that, with His soul full of that, joy comes and pain comes, and both are welcomed and dismissed with thankfulness because their coming and their going bring the end for which He lives more near.

Such be our lives! As Jesus was, so may we be, seeking an end so great, so constant, so eternal that every change may come to us and be our minister and not our conqueror; that even our cross may come as His came, and men may gather round it and say, "Alas, then this is all! Alas, that finally it should all come to this! " While we who hang upon the cross cry, " It is finished, " with a shout of triumph, counting the finishing but a new beginning, and looking out beyond the cross to richer growth in character, and braver and n fruitful service of our Lord! THE END.