Dear Reader, we are now about closing another year. This number
completes our weekly visits for another year. The time appears short
since we made the first visit this year, still, fifty-two weeks have
run their course. Another year has fled, and is now numbered with the
years before the flood. The good deeds of the righteous are entered on
the records of eternity, to come up to their everlasting honor in the
day when the righteous judge shall award to every man according to his
works. Not only so, but all the crimes, the transgressions, and acts of
disobedience of every variety, in a long catalogue, have gone up and
been registered in the book of remembrance before the Lord. What a list
must that be! What a spectacle must this world be, with all its dark
crimes and acts of rebellion against the Majesty of heaven and earth, to
the eye of the omniscient One! Every den of drunkenness, debauchery,
profanity, lying and gambling, lies spread open to the All-seeing
eye. Not an oath falls without his notice, not a fraud, a deception,
cheat, lie, or crime of any sort escapes Omniscience. All, all sins,
transgressions and misdemeanors of every sort are treasured up and kept
in store for the day of final account.
What adds to the solemnity of the matter is, that no amends can be
made in acts of the past. There they stand irrevocably, so far as we
are concerned. The Lord may wash away every stain in his own precious
blood, where persons come to him in a proper manner. But even this
does not amend for the past. It takes away our guilt, and is a means
of saving us. But the wrongs done remain wrong and will so remain for
ever. Repentance changes not the wrong done. In the same way, the
good neglected, during the year now closing, will so remain for ever.
We can do good, it is true, the coming year; but that we could have
done, and that it would have been our duty to have done, if we had
done good all last year. Opportunities for doing good never return.
Other opportunities may come, but they would have come if no previous
opportunities had been neglected. You had an opportunity this year to
have ministered to the wants of the poor widow, the orphan, the sick,
the afflicted and distressed, but these opportunities are now gone, and
gone forever. If neglected, there is no remedy; that neglect remains
forever. We may repent, obtain forgiveness and do good in time to come,
but all that good could have been done just as well had there been no
previous neglect, and would have been more liable to have been done,
for one delinquency opens the way for another and has a tendency to
induce it.
In closing the year, it is well enough for us to cast an eye back over
the ground, not to amend the year now closing, for that is impossible,
but to see where the delinquency has been, and determine that a similar
delinquency shall not be found in the work of the coming year. In
this way, we may profit by looking over the past. What, then has been
entered to our account on the records of eternity? What have we done as
a great religious body? What have we done as individual congregations,
or communities? What have we done as families? What have we done as
individuals? What have we done as teachers in the Sunday schools? What
have we done as preachers of the gospel? What have we done as religious
editors? Now is the time to review and see how the account stands
before the Lord. If the Lord should call on us for our annual report,
ARE WE READY?