It is hard for any of us to realise this in the midst of the rush and
pressure of daily duty; and it is not altogether wholesome to think
much about it; but it is still more harmful to put it out of our
sight, as so many of us do, and to go on habitually as if there would
never come a time when we shall cease to be where we have been so
long, and when there will no more arise the daily calls to transitory
occupations. The thought of the certainty and nearness of that end has
often become a stimulus to wild, sensuous living, as the history of
the relaxation of morality in pestilences, and in times when war
stalked through the land, has abundantly shown. 'Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die,' is plainly a way of reasoning that appeals to
the average man. But the entire forgetfulness that there is an end is
no less harmful, and is apt to lead to over-indulgence in sensuous
desires as the other extreme. Perhaps the young need more especially
to be recalled to the thought of the 'end' because they are more
especially likely to forget it, and because it is specially worth
their while to remember it. They have still the long stretch before
the 'end' before them, to make of it what they will. Whereas for us
who are further on in the course, there is less time and opportunity
to shape our path with a view to its close, and to those of us in old
age, there is but little need to preach remembrance of what has come
so close to us. It is to the young man that the Preacher proffers his
final advice, to 'rejoice in his health, and to walk in the ways of
his heart, and in the sight of his eyes,' but withal to know that 'for
these God will bring him into judgment.'
And in that counsel is involved the thought that 'the end which is
better than the beginning' is neither old age, with its limitations
and compulsory abstinences, nor death, which is, as the dreary creed
of the book in its central portions believes it to be, the close of
all things, but, beyond these, the state in which men will reap as
they have sown, and inherit what they have earned. It is that
condition which gives all its importance to death--the porter who
opens the door into a future life of recompence.