Of course the fragmentary sentence in our second text needs to be
completed from the context, and so completed will stand, 'God chastens
us for our profit, that we should be partakers of His holiness.' Now
let us consider for a moment the thought that the true meaning of life
is _discipline_. I say discipline rather than 'chastening,' for
chastening simply implies the fact of pain, whereas discipline
includes the wholesome _purpose_ of pain. The true meaning of
life is not to be found by estimating its sorrows or its joys, but by
trying to estimate the effects of either upon us. The true value of
life, and the meaning of all its tears and of all its joys, is what it
makes us. If the enormous effort which struck the Preacher issues in
strengthened muscles and braced limbs, it is not 'vanity.' He who
carries away with him out of life a character moulded as God would
have it, does not go in all points 'naked as he came.' He bears a
developed self, and that is the greatest treasure that a man can carry
out of multitudinous toils of the busiest life. If we would think less
of our hard work and of our heavy sorrows, and more of the loving
purpose which appoints them all, we should find life less difficult,
less toilsome, less mysterious. That one thought taken to our hearts,
and honestly applied to everything that befalls us, would untie many a
riddle, would wipe away many a tear, would bring peace and patience
into many a heart, and would make still brighter many a gladness.
Without it our lives are a chaos; with it they would become an ordered
world.
But the recognition of the hand that ministers the discipline is
needed to complete the peacefulness of faith. It would be a dreary
world if we could only think of some inscrutable or impersonal power
that inflicted the discipline; but if in its sharpest pangs we give
'reverence to the Father of spirits,' we shall 'live.' Of course, a
loving father sees to his children's education, and a loving child
cannot but believe that the father's single purpose in all his
discipline is his good. The good that is sought to be attained by the
sharpest chastisement is better than the good that is given by weak
indulgence. When the father's hand wields the rod, and a loving child
receives the strokes, they may sting, but they do not wound. The
'fathers of our flesh chasten us after their own pleasure,' and there
may be error and arbitrariness in their action; and the child may
sometimes nourish a right sense of injustice, but 'the Father of
spirits' makes no mistakes, and never strikes too hard. 'He for our
profit' carries with it the declaration that the deep heart of God
doth not willingly afflict, and seeks in afflicting for nothing but
His children's good.
Nor are these all the truths by which the New Testament completes and
supersedes the Preacher's pessimism, for our text closes by unveiling
the highest profit which discipline is meant to secure to us as being
that we should be 'partakers of His holiness.' The Biblical conception
of holiness in God is that of separation from and elevation above the
creature. Man's holiness is separation from the world and dedication
to God. He is separated from the world by moral perfection yet more
than by His other attributes, and men who have yielded themselves to
Him will share in that characteristic. This assimilation to His nature
is the highest 'profit' to which we can attain, and all the purpose of
His chastening is to make us more completely like Himself. 'The
fathers of our flesh' chasten with a view to the brief earthly life,
but His chastening looks onwards beyond the days of 'strife and
vanity' to a calm eternity.
Thus, then, the immortality which glimmered doubtfully in the end of
his book before the eyes of the Preacher is the natural inference for
the Christian thought of moral discipline as the great purpose of
life. No doubt it might be possible for a man to believe in the
supreme importance of character, and in all the discipline of life as
subsidiary to its development, and yet not believe in another world,
where all that was tendency, often thwarted, should be accomplished
result, and the schooling ended the rod should be broken. But such a
position will be very rare and very absurd. To recognise moral
discipline as the greatest purpose of life, gives quite overwhelming
probability to a future. Surely God does not take such pains with us
in order to make no more of us than He makes of us in this world.
Surely human life becomes 'confusion worse confounded' if it is
carefully, sedulously, continuously tended, checked, inspired,
developed by all the various experiences of sorrow and joy, and then,
at death, broken short off, as a man might break a stick across his
knee, and the fragments tossed aside and forgotten. If we can say, 'He
for our profit that we might be partakers of His holiness,' we have
the right to say 'We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He
is.'
'A TIME TO PLANT'
'A time to plant.'--Eccles. iii. 2.
The writer enumerates in this context a number of opposite courses of
conduct arranged in pairs, each of which is right at the right time.
The view thus presented seems to him to be depressing, and to make
life difficult to understand, and aimless. We always appear to be
building up with one hand and pulling down with the other. The ship
never heads for two miles together in the same direction. The history
of human affairs appears to be as purposeless as the play of the wind
on the desert sands, which it sometimes piles into huge mounds and
then scatters.
So he concludes that only God, who appoints the seasons that demand
opposite courses of conduct, can understand what it all means. The
engine-driver knows why he reverses his engine, and not the wheels
that are running in opposite directions in consecutive moments
according to his will.
Now that is a one-sided view, of course, for it is to be remembered
that the Book of Ecclesiastes is the logbook of a voyager after truth,
and tells us all the wanderings and errors of his thinking until he
has arrived at the haven of the conclusion that he announces in the
final word: 'Hear the sum of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His
commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.'
I have nothing to do just now with the conclusion which he arrives at,
but the facts from which he starts are significant and important.
There are things in life, God has so arranged it, which can only be
done fittingly, and for the most part of all, at certain seasons; and
the secret of success is the discernment of present duty, and the
prompt performance of it.
And this is especially true about your time of life, my young friends.
There are things, very important things, which, unless you do them
now, the overwhelming probability is that you will never do at all;
and the certainty is that you will not do them half as well. And so I
want to ask you to look at these words, which, by a legitimate
extension of the writer's meaning, and taking them in a kind of
parabolic way, may sum up for us the whole of the special duties of
youth. 'A time to plant.'
I. Now, my first remark is this: that you are now in the planting time
of your lives.
No wise forester will try to shift shrubs or to put them into his
gardens or woods, except in late autumn or early spring. And our lives
are as really under the dominion of the law of seasons as the green
world of the forest and the fields. Speaking generally, and admitting
the existence of many exceptions, the years between childhood and,
say, two or three-and-twenty, for a young man or woman, for the most
part settle the main outline of their character, and thereby determine
their history, which, after all, is mainly the outcome of their
character.
You have wide possibilities before you, of moulding your characters
into beauty, and purity, holiness, and strength.
For one thing, you have got no past, or next to none written all over,
which it is hard to erase. You have substantially a clean sheet on
which to write what you like. Your stage of life predisposes you in
favour of novelty. New things are glad things to you, whereas to us
older people a new thought coming into some of our brains is like a
new bit of furniture coming into a crowded room. All the other pieces
need to be arranged, and it is more of a trouble than anything else.
You are flexible and plastic as yet, like the iron running out of the
blast furnace in a molten stream, which in half an hour's time will be
a rigid bar that no man can bend.
You have all these things in your favour, and so, dear young friends,
whether you think of it or not, whether voluntarily or not, I want you
to remember that this awful process is going on inevitably and
constantly in every one of you. You are planting, whether you
recognise the fact or no. What are you planting?
Well, for one thing, you are making _habits_, which are but
actions hardened, like the juice that exudes from the pine-tree,
liquid, or all but liquid, when it comes out, and when exposed to the
air, is solidified and tenacious. The old legend of the man in the
tower who got a slim thread up to his window, to which was attached
one thicker and then thicker, and so on ever increasing until he
hauled in a cable, is a true parable of what goes on in every human
life. Some one deed, a thin film like a spider's thread, draws after
it a thicker, by that inevitable law that a thing done once tends to
be done twice, and that the second time it is easier than the first
time. A man makes a track with great difficulty across the snow in a
morning, but every time that he travels it, it is a little harder, and
the track is a little broader, and it is easier walking. You play with
the tiger's whelp of some pleasant, questionable enjoyment, and you
think that it will always keep so innocent, with its budding claws not
able to draw blood, but it grows--_it grows_. And it grows
according to its kind, and what was a plaything one day is a
full-grown and ravening wild beast in a while. You are making habits,
whatever else you are making, and you are planting in your hearts
seeds that will spring and bear fruit according to their kind.
Then remember, you are planting _belief_.--Most of us, I am
afraid, get our opinions by haphazard; like the child in the
well-known story, whose only account of herself was that 'she expected
she growed.' That is the way by which most of you come to what you
dignify by the name of your opinions. They come in upon you, you do
not know how. Youth is receptive of anything new. You can learn a vast
deal more easily than many of us older people can. Set down a man who
has never learned the alphabet, to learn his letters, and see what a
task it is for him. Or if he takes a pen in his hand for the first
time, look how difficult the stiff wrist and thick knuckles find it to
bend. Yours is the time for forming your opinions, for forming some
rational and intelligent account of yourself and the world about you.
See to it, that you plant truth in your hearts, under which you may
live sheltered for many days.
Then again, you are planting character, which is not only habit, but
something more. You are making _yourselves_, whatever else you
are making. You begin with almost boundless possibilities, and these
narrow and narrow and narrow, according to your actions, until you
have laid the rails on which you travel--one narrow line that you
cannot get off. A man's character is, if I may use a chemical term, a
'precipitate' from his actions. Why, it takes acres of roses to make a
flask of perfume; and all the long life of a man is represented in his
ultimate character. Character is formed like those chalk cliffs in the
south, built up eight hundred feet, beetling above the stormy sea; and
all made up of the relics of microscopic animals. So you build up a
great solid structure--yourself--out of all your deeds. You are making
your character, your habits, your opinions.--And you are making your
reputation too. And you will not be able to get rid of that. This is
the time for you to make a good record or a bad one, in other people's
opinions.
And so, young men and women, boys and girls, I want you to remember
the permanent effects of your most fleeting acts. Nothing ever dies
that a man does. Nothing! You go into a museum, and you will see
standing there a slab of red sandstone, and little dints and dimples
upon it. What are they? Marks made by a flying shower that lasted for
five minutes, nobody knows how many millenniums ago. And there they
are, and there they will be until the world is burned up. So our
fleeting deeds are all recorded here, in our permanent character.
Everything that we have done is laid up there in the testimony of the
rocks:--
'Through our soul the echoes roll,
And grow for ever and for ever.'