October 27

Surely every man walketh in a vain show; surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.—Psalms 39:6.

Every man walketh in a vain show. His walk is nothing but a going on in continual vanity, adding a new stock of vanity, of his own coining, to what he has already within, and vexation of spirit woven all along in with it. He walks in an image, as the word is; converses with things of no reality, and which have no solidity in them, and he himself has as little. He himself is a walking image, in the midst of these images. They who are taken with the conceit of images and pictures, that is an emblem of their own life, and of all other men's also. Every man's fancy is to himself a gallery of pictures, and there he walks up and down, and considers not how vain these are, and how vain a thing he himself is.

My brethren, they are happy persons (but few are they in number) who are truly weaned from all those images and fancies the world dotes so much upon. If many of the children of men would turn their own thoughts backward in the evening but of one day, what would they find for the most part, but that they have been walking among these pictures, and passing from one vanity to another, and back again to and fro, to as little purpose as the running up and down of children at their play! He who runs after honor, pleasure, popular esteem,—what do you think? Does not that man walk in an image, pursuing after that which hath no other being than what the opinion and fancy of men give to it?—especially the last, which is a thing so fluctuating, uncertain, and inconstant, that while he hath it, he hath nothing? The other image that man follows and worships, is that in the text, that wretched madness of heaping up riches. This is the great foolishness and disease especially of old age, that the less way a man has to go, he makes the greater provision for it. When the hands are stiff, and fit for no other labor, they are fitted and composed for scraping together. But for what end dost thou take all this pains? If for thyself, a little sober care will do thy turn, if thy desires be sober; and if not so, thy diligence were better bestowed in impairing and diminishing of these; that is the easier way a great deal. And if it be for others, why dost thou take a certain unease to thyself, for the uncertain ease of others? And who these are thou dost not know; may be, such as thou didst never intend them for. It were good we used more easy and undistracted diligence for the increasing of those treasures which we can not deny are far better, and whosoever hath them may abound therein with increase; he knows well for whom he gathers them; he himself shall possess them through all eternity.

If there were not a hope beyond this life, there were reasons for that passionate word of the psalmist, Why hast thou made all men in vain? To what purpose were it for poor wretched man to have been all his days tossed upon the waves of vanity, and then to lie down in the grave, and be no more heard of? But it is not so: he is made capable of a noble and blessed life beyond this; and our forgetfulness of this is the cause of all our misery and vanity here.

It is a great folly to complain of the shortness of our life, and yet to lavish it out so prodigally on trifles and shadows. If it were well managed, it would be sufficient for all we have to do. The only way to live indeed, is to be doing service to God and good to men: this is to live much in a little time. But when we play the fool in misspending our time, it may be indeed a sad thought to us, when we find it gone, and we are benighted in the dark so far from our home. But those that have their souls untied from this world and knit to God, they need not complain of the shortness of it, having laid hold on eternal life. For this life is flying away, there is no laying hold on it; and it is no matter how soon it go away; the sooner the better, for to such persons it seems rather to go too slow.