December 28

"The years of thy life shall be many."—Proverbs 4:10.

THE glowing promise is spoken of him who finds wisdom—the wisdom of heaven. But is it a true word?

So often the promise seems falsified. The saints burn out for God, and their light, intense while it lasts, is quickly quenched. There are the martyrs taken in their youth. Blandina and Felicitas and Perpetua in the first days; Margaret Wilson and James Renwick in the killing time in Scotland; Kakumba and Seruwanga and Lugalama, the Buganda boys, on the scaffold by the shores of the Victoria Nyanza, in our own century. There are the missionaries who fall when they are buckling on their armour, David Brainerd, and Harriet Newell, and Henry Martyn, and Ion Keith-Falconer. There was the Baptist beheaded when he had seen little more than thirty summers and winters. There was the Saviour, crucified in shamefulness and sorrowfulness when He was not yet fifty years old.

Ah yes, but every one of these "fulfilled a long time in a short time." One crowded hour of their glorious life is worth an age of my ineffectual years. The good they did survives them too, in a world made better by their presence. And as for themselves, they are with God in the abiding mansions of the city which cannot be shaken. Wisdom has kept her word with them after all.

My soul, awake and arise; busy thyself in thine own nurture and in winning others and in leavening the world with truth and grace, and thy minutes will have the value of millenniums. For it is true what Augustine says—Junge cor tuum immortalitati Dei, et cum Illo ceternus cris.