The joy of finishing and of finishing well! There is no joy on earth
comparable to this. Who is there that has not read a dozen times the
immortal postscript that Gibbon added to his _Decline and Fall_? He
describes the tumult of emotion with which, after twenty years of
closest application, he wrote the last line of the last chapter of the
last volume of his masterpiece. It was a glorious summer's night at
Lausanne. 'After laying down my pen,' he says, 'I took several turns in
a covered walk of acacias which commands a prospect of the country, the
lake and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the
silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was
silent.' It was the greatest moment of his life. We recall, too, the
similar experience of Sir Archibald Alison. 'As I approached the closing
sentence of my _History of the Empire_,' he says, 'I went up to Mrs.
Alison to call her down to witness the conclusion, and she saw the last
words of the work written, and signed her name on the margin. It would
be affectation to conceal the deep emotion that I felt at this event.'
Or think of the last hours of Venerable Bede. Living away back in the
early dawn of our English story--twelve centuries ago--the old man had
set himself to translate the Gospel of John into our native speech.
Cuthbert, one of his young disciples, has bequeathed to us the touching
record. As the work approached completion, he says, death drew on apace.
The aged scholar was racked with pain; sleep forsook him; he could
scarcely breathe. The young man who wrote at his dictation implored him
to desist. But he would not rest. They came at length to the final
chapter; could he possibly live till it was done?
'And now, dear master,' exclaimed the young scribe tremblingly, 'only
one sentence remains!' He read the words and the sinking man feebly
recited the English equivalents.
'It is finished, dear master!' cried the youth excitedly.
'Ay, _it is finished_!' echoed the dying saint; 'lift me up, place me at
that window of my cell at which I have so often prayed to God. Now glory
be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost!' And, with these
triumphant words, the beautiful spirit passed to its rest and its
reward.
V
In his own narrative of his conversion, Hudson Taylor quotes James
Proctor's well-known hymn--the hymn that, in one of his essays, Froude
criticizes so severely:
Nothing either great or small,
Nothing, sinner, no;
Jesus did it, did it all,
Long, long ago.
'_It is Finished!_' yes, indeed,
Finished every jot;
Sinner, this is all you need;
Tell me, is it not?
Cast your deadly doing down,
Down at Jesus' feet;
Stand in Him, in Him alone,
Gloriously complete.
Froude maintains that these verses are immoral. It is only by 'doing,'
he argues, that the work of the world can ever get done. And if you
describe 'doing' as 'deadly' you set a premium upon indolence and lessen
the probabilities of attainment. The best answer to Froude's plausible
contention is the _Life of Hudson Taylor_. Hudson Taylor became
convinced, as a boy, that 'the whole work was finished and the whole
debt paid.' 'There is nothing for me to do,' he says, 'but to fall down
on my knees and accept the Saviour.' The chapter in his biography that
tells of this spiritual crisis is entitled '_The Finished Work of
Christ_,' and it is headed by the quotation:
Upon a life I did not live,
Upon a death I did not die,
Another's life, Another's death
I stake my whole eternity.
And, as I have said, the very words that Froude so bitterly condemns are
quoted by Hudson Taylor as a reflection of his own experience. And the
result? The result is that Hudson Taylor became one of the most
prodigious toilers of all time. So far from his trust in '_the Finished
Work of Christ_' inclining him to indolence, he felt that he must toil
most terribly to make so perfect a Saviour known to the whole wide
world. There lies on my desk a Birthday Book which I very highly value.
It was given me at the docks by Mr. Thomas Spurgeon as I was leaving
England. If you open it at the twenty-first of May you will find these
words: '_"Simply to Thy Cross I cling" is but half of the Gospel. No one
is really clinging to the Cross who is not at the same time faithfully
following Christ and doing whatsoever He commands_'; and against those
words of Dr. J. R. Miller's in my Birthday Book, you may see the
autograph of _J. Hudson Taylor_. He was our guest at the Mosgiel Manse
when he set his signature to those striking and significant sentences.