'The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he
beg in harvest, and have nothing.'--PROVERBS xx. 4.
Like all the sayings of this book, this is simply a piece of plain,
practical common sense, intended to inculcate the lesson that men
should diligently seize the opportunity whilst it is theirs. The
sluggard is one of the pet aversions of the Book of Proverbs, which,
unlike most other manuals of Eastern wisdom, has a profound reverence
for honest work.
He is a great drone, for he prefers the chimney-corner to the field,
even although it cannot have been very cold if the weather was open
enough to admit of ploughing. And he is a great fool, too, for he buys
his comfort at a very dear price, as do all men who live for to-day,
and let to-morrow look out for itself.
But like most of the other sayings of this book, my text contains
principles which are true in the highest regions of human life, for
the laws which rule up there are not different from those which
regulate the motions of its lower phases. Religion recognises the same
practical common-sense principles that daily business does. I venture
to take this as my text now, in addressing young people, because they
have special need of, and special facilities for, the wisdom which it
enjoins; and because the words only want to be turned with their faces
heavenwards in order to enforce the great appeal, the only one which
it is worth my while to make, and worth your while to come here to
listen to; the appeal to each of you, 'I beseech you, by the mercies
of God, that ye yield yourselves to God' _now_.
My object, then, will be perhaps best accomplished if I simply ask you
to look, first, at the principles involved in this quaint proverb;
and, secondly, to apply them in one or two directions.
I. First, then, let us try to bring out the principles which are
crystallised in this picturesque saying.
The first thought evidently is: present conduct determines future
conditions. Life is a series of epochs, each of which has its destined
work, and that being done, all is well; and that being left undone,
all is ill.
Now, of course, in regard to many of the accidents of a man's
condition, his conduct is only one, and by no means the most powerful,
of the factors which settle them. The position which a man fills, the
tasks which he has to perform, and the whole host of things which make
up the externals of his life, depend upon far other conditions than
any that he brings to them. But yet on the whole it is true that what
a man does, and is, settles how he fares. And this is the mystical
importance and awful solemnity of the most undistinguished moments and
most trivial acts of this awful life of ours, that each of them has an
influence on all that comes after, and may deflect our whole course
into altogether different paths. It is not only the moments that we
vulgarly and blindly call great which settle our condition, but it is
the accumulation of the tiny ones; the small deeds, the unnoticed
acts, which make up so large a portion of every man's life. It is
these, after all, that are the most powerful in settling what we shall
be. There come to each of us supreme moments in our lives. Yes! and if
in all the subordinate and insignificant moments we have not been
getting ready for them, but have been nurturing dispositions and
acquiring habits, and cultivating ways of acting and thinking which
condemn us to fail beneath the requirements of the supreme moment,
then it passes us by, and we gain nothing from it. Tiny mica flakes
have built up the Matterhorn, and the minute acts of life after all,
by their multiplicity, make up life to be what it is. 'Sand is heavy,'
says this wise book of Proverbs. The aggregation of the minutest
grains, singly so light that they would not affect the most delicate
balance, weighs upon us with a weight 'heavy as frost, and deep almost
as life.' The mystic significance of the trivialities of life is that
in them we largely make destiny, and that in them we wholly make
character.
And now, whilst this is true about all life, it is especially true
about youth. You have facilities for moulding your being which some of
us older men would give a great deal to have again for a moment, with
our present knowledge and bitter experience. The lava that has
solidified into hard rock with us is yet molten and plastic with you.
You can, I was going to say, be anything you make up your minds to;
and, within reasonable limits, the bold saying is true. 'Ask what thou
wilt and it shall be given to thee' is what nature and Providence,
almost as really as grace and Christ, say to every young man and
woman, because you are the arbiters, not wholly, indeed, of your
destiny, and are the architects, altogether, of your character, which
is more.
And so I desire to lay upon your hearts this threadbare old truth,
because you are living in the ploughing time, and the harvest is
months ahead. Whilst it is true that every day is the child of all the
yesterdays, and the parent of all the to-morrows, it is also true that
life has its predominant colouring, varying at different epochs, and
that for you, though you are largely inheriting, even now, the results
of your past, brief as it is, still more largely is the future, the
plastic future, in your hands, to be shaped into such forms as you
will. 'The child is father of the man,' and the youth has the blessed
prerogative of standing before the mouldable to-morrow, and possessing
a nature still capable of being cast into an almost infinite variety
of form.
But then, not only do you stand with special advantages for making
yourselves what you will, but you specially need to be reminded of the
terrible importance and significance of each moment. For this is the
very irony of human life, that we seldom awake to the sense of its
importance till it is nearly ended, and that the period when
reflection would avail the most is precisely the period when it is the
least strong and habitual. What is the use of an old man like me
thinking about what he could make of life if he had it to do over
again, as compared with the advantage of your doing it? Yet I dare say
that for once that you think thus, my contemporaries do it fifty
times. So, not to abate one jot of your buoyancy, not to cast any
shadow over joys and hopes, but to lift you to a sense of the blessed
possibilities of your position, I want to lay this principle of my
text upon your consciences, and to beseech you to try to keep it
operatively in mind--you are making yourselves, and settling your
destiny, by every day of your plastic youth.
There is another principle as clear in my text--viz., the easy road is
generally the wrong one. The sluggard was warmer at the fireside than
he would be in the field with his plough in the north wind, and so he
stopped there. There are always obstacles in the way of noble life. It
is always easier, as flesh judges, to live ignobly than to live as
Jesus Christ would have us live. 'Endure hardness' is the commandment
to all who would be soldiers of any great cause, and would not fling
away their lives in low self-indulgence. If a man is going to be
anything worth being, or to do anything worth doing, he must start
with, and adhere to this, 'to scorn delights and live laborious days.'
And only then has he a chance of rising above the fat dull weed that
rots in Lethe's stream, and of living anything like the life that it
becomes him to live.
Be sure of this, dear young friends, that self-denial and rigid
self-control, in its two forms, of stopping your ears to the
attractions of lower pleasures, and of cheerily encountering
difficulties, is an indispensable condition of any life which shall at
the last yield a harvest worth the gathering, and not destined to be
'Cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete.'
Never allow yourselves to be turned away from the plain path of duty
by any difficulties. Never allow yourselves to be guided in your
choice of a road by the consideration that the turf is smooth, and the
flowers by the side of it sweet. Remember, the sluggard would have
been warmer, with a wholesome warmth, at the ploughtail than cowering
in the chimney corner. And the things that seem to be difficulties and
hardships only need to be fronted to yield, like the east wind in its
season, good results in bracing and hardening. Fix it in your minds
that nothing worth doing is done but at the cost of difficulty and
toil.
That is a lesson that this generation wants, even more than some that
have lived. I suppose it is one of the temptations of older men to
look askance upon the amusements of younger ones, but I cannot help
lifting up here one word of earnest appeal to the young men and women
of this congregation, and beseeching them, as they value the nobleness
of their own lives, and their power of doing any real good, to beware
of what seems to me the altogether extravagant and excessive love, and
following after, of mere amusement which characterises this day to so
large an extent. Better toil than such devotion to mere relaxation.
The last principle here is that the season let slip is gone for ever.
Whether my text, in its second picture, intends us to think of the
sluggard when the harvest came as 'begging' from his neighbours; or
whether, as is possibly the construction of the Hebrew, it simply
means to describe him as going out into his field, and looking at it,
and asking for the harvest and seeing nothing there but weeds, the
lesson it conveys is the same--the old, old lesson, so threadbare that
I should be almost ashamed of taking up your time with it unless I
believed that you did not lay it to heart as you should. Opportunity
is bald behind, and must be grasped by the forelock. Life is full of
tragic _might-have-beens_. No regret, no remorse, no
self-accusation, no clear recognition that I was a fool will avail one
jot. The time for ploughing is past; you cannot stick the share into
the ground when you should be wielding the sickle. 'Too late' is the
saddest of human words. And, my brother, as the stages of our lives
roll on, unless each is filled as it passes with the discharge of the
duties, and the appropriation of the benefits which it brings, then,
to all eternity, that moment will never return, and the sluggard may
beg in harvest, that he may have the chance to plough once more, and
have none. The student that has spent the term in indolence, perhaps
dissipation, has no time to get up his subject when he is in the
examination-room, with the paper before him. And life, and nature, and
God's law, which is the Christian expression for the heathen one of
_nature_, are stern taskmasters, and demand that the duty shall
be done in its season or left undone for ever.
II. In the second place, let me, just in a few words, carry the lamp
of these principles of my text and flash its rays upon one or two
subjects.
Let me say a word, first, about the lowest sphere to which my text
applies. I referred at the beginning of this discourse to this proverb
as simply an inculcation of the duty of honest work, and of the
necessity of being wide awake to opportunities in our daily work. Now,
the most of you young men, and many of you young women, are destined
for ordinary trades, professions, walks in commerce; and I do not
suppose it to be beneath the dignity of the pulpit to say this: Do not
trust to any way of getting on by dodges or speculation, or favour, or
anything but downright hard work. Don't shirk difficulties, don't try
to put the weight of the work upon some colleague or other, that you
may have an easier life of it. Set your backs to your tasks, and
remember that 'in all labour there is profit'; and whether the profit
comes to you in the shape of advancement, position, promotion in your
offices, partnerships perhaps, wealth, and the like, or no, the profit
lies in the work. Honest toil is the key to pleasure.
Then, let me apply the text in a somewhat higher direction. Carry
these principles with you in the cultivation of that important part of
yourself--your intellects. What would some of us old students give if
we had the flexibility, the power of assimilating new truth, the
retentive memories, that you young people have? Some of you, perhaps,
are students by profession; I should like all of you to make a
conscience of making the best of your brains, as God has given them to
you, a trust. 'The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold.'
The dawdler will read no books that tax his intellect, therefore shall
he beg in harvest and have nothing. Amidst all the flood of feeble,
foolish, flaccid literature with which we are afflicted at this day, I
wonder how many of you young men and women ever set yourselves to some
great book or subject that you cannot understand without effort.
Unless you do you are not faithful stewards of the supreme gift of God
to you of that great faculty which apprehends and lives upon truth. So
remember the sluggard by his fireside; and do you get out with your
plough.
Again I say, apply these principles to a higher work still--that of
the formation of character. Nothing will come to you noble, great,
elevating, in that direction, unless it is sought, and sought with
toil.
'In woods, in waves, in wars, she wont to dwell,
And will be found with peril and with pain;
Before her gate high Heaven did sweat ordain,
And wakeful watches ever to abide.'
Wisdom and truth, and all their elevating effects upon human
character, require absolutely for their acquirement effort and toil.
You have the opportunity still. As I said a moment ago--you may mould
yourselves into noble forms. But in the making of character we have to
work as a painter in fresco does, with a swift brush on the plaster
while it is wet. It sets and hardens in an hour. And men drift into
habits which become tyrannies and dominant before they know where they
are. Don't let yourselves be shaped by accident, by circumstance.
Remember that you can build yourselves up into forms of beauty by the
help of the grace of God, and that for such building there must be the
diligent labour and the wise clutching at opportunity and
understanding of the times which my text suggests.
And, lastly, let these principles applied to religion teach us the
wisdom and necessity of beginning the Christian life at the earliest
moment. I am by no means prepared to say that the extreme tragedy of
my text can ever be wrought out in regard to the religious experience
of any man here on earth, for I believe that at any moment in his
career, however faultful and stained his past has been, and however
long and obstinate has been his continuance in evil, a man may turn
himself to Jesus Christ, and beg, and not in vain, nor ever find
'nothing' there.
But whilst all that is quite true, I want you, dear young friends, to
lay this to heart, that if you do not yield yourselves to Jesus Christ
now, in your early days, and take Him for your Saviour, and rest your
souls upon Him, and then take Him for your Captain and Commander, for
your Pattern and Example, for your Companion and your Aim, you will
lose what you can never make up by any future course. You lose years
of blessedness, of peaceful society with Him, of illumination and
inspiration. You lose all the sweetness of the days which you spend
away from Him. And if at the end you did come to Him, you would have
one regret, deep and permanent, that you had not gone to Him before.
If you put off, as some of you are putting off, what you know you
ought to do--namely, give your hearts to Jesus Christ and become
His--think of what you are laying up for yourselves thereby. You get
much that it would be gain to lose--bitter memories, defiled
imaginations, stings of conscience, habits that it will be very hard
to break, and the sense of having wasted the best part of your lives,
and having but the fag end to bring to Him. And if you put off, as
some of you are disposed to do, think of the risk you run. It is very
unlikely that susceptibilities will remain if they are trifled with.
You remember that Felix trembled once, and sent for Paul often; but we
never hear that he trembled any more. And it is quite possible, and
quite likely, more likely than not, that you will never be as near
being a Christian again as you are now, if you turn away from the
impressions that are made upon you at this moment, and stifle the
half-formed resolution.
But there is a more solemn thought still. This life as a whole is to
the future life as the ploughing time is to the harvest, and there are
awful words in Scripture which seem to point in the same direction in
reference to the irrevocable and irreversible issue of neglected
opportunities on earth, as this proverb does in regard to the
ploughing and harvests of this life.
I dare not conceal what seems to me the New Testament confirmation and
deepening of the solemn words of our text, 'He shall beg in harvest
and have nothing,' by the Master's words, 'Many shall say to me in
that day, Lord! Lord I and I will say, I never knew you.' The five
virgins who rubbed their sleepy eyes and asked for oil when the master
was at hand got none, and when they besought, 'Lord! Lord! open to
us,' all the answer was, 'Too late! too late! ye cannot enter now.'
Now, while it is called day, harden not your hearts.