'The labour wearies every one of them.' The word translated 'labour'
seems to carry with it both the idea of effort and of trouble. Or to
recur to a familiar distinction in modern English, the word really
covers both the ground of work and of worry. And it is a sad and
solemn thought that a word with that double element in it should be
the one which is most truly applicable to the efforts of a large
majority of men. I suppose there never was a time in the world's
history when life went so fast as it does in these great centres of
civilisation and commerce in which you and I live. And it is awful to
have to think that the great mass of it all ends in nothing else but
tired limbs and exhaustion. That is a truth to be verified by
experience, and I am bold to believe that every man and woman in this
chapel now can say more or less distinctly 'Amen!' to the assertion
that every life, except a distinctly and supremely religious one, is
worry and work without adequate satisfying result, and with no lasting
issue but exhaustion.
Let us begin at the bottom. For instance, take a man who has avowedly
flung aside the restraints of right and wrong and conscience, and does
things habitually that he knows to be wrong. Every sin is a blunder as
well as a crime. No man who aims at an end through the smoke of hell
gets the end that he aims at. Or if he does, he gets something that
takes all the gilt off the gingerbread, and all the sweetness out of
the success. They put a very evil-tasting ingredient into spirits of
wine to prevent its being drunk. The cup that sin reaches to a man,
though the wine moveth itself aright and is very pleasant to look at
before being tasted, cheats with _methylated_ spirits. Men and
women take more pains and trouble to damn themselves than ever they do
to have their souls saved. The end of all work, which begins with
tossing conscience on one side, is simply this--'The labour of the
foolish wearieth every one of them.'
Take a step higher--a respectable, well-to-do Manchester man,
successful in business. He has made it his aim to build up a large
concern, and has succeeded. He has a fine house, carriages,
greenhouses; he has 'J.P.' to his name; he stands high in credit and
on Change. His name is one that gives respectability to anything that
it is connected with. Has he 'come to the city'? Has he got what he
thought he would get when he began his career? He has succeeded in his
immediate and smaller purpose; has that immediate and smaller purpose
succeeded in bringing him what he thought it would bring him? Or has
he fallen a victim to those--
'juggling fiends ...
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to the ear,
And break it to the hope?'
They tell us that if you put down in one column the value of the ore
that has been extracted from all the Australian gold-mines, and in
another the amount that it has cost to get it, the latter sum will
exceed the former. There are plenty of people in Manchester who have
put more down into the pit from which they dig their wealth than ever
they will get out of it. And their labour, too, leaves a very dark and
empty aching centre in their lives, 'and wearieth every one of them.'
And so I might go the whole round. We students, so long as our pursuit
of knowledge has not in it as supreme, directing motive, and ultimate
aim and issue, the glory and the service of God, come under the lash
of the same condemnation as those grosser and lower forms of life of
which I have been speaking. But wherever we look, if there be not in
the heart and in the life a supreme regard to God and a communion with
Him, then this characteristic is common to all the courses, that,
whilst they may each meet some immediate and partial necessity of our
natures, none of them is adequate for the whole circumference of a
man's being, nor any of them able, during the whole duration of that
being, to be his satisfaction and his rest. Therefore, I say, all
toil, however successful to the view of a shorter range of vision, and
however noble--excluding the noblest of all--all toil that ends only
in securing that which perishes with the using, or that which we leave
behind us here when we pass hence, is condemned for folly and labour
that wearies the men who are fools enough to surrender themselves to
it.
I need not remind you of the wonderful variety of metaphor under which
that threadbare thought, which yet it is so hard for us to believe and
make operative in our lives, is represented to us in Scripture. Just
let me recall one or two of them in the briefest way. 'Why do ye spend
your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which
profiteth not?' 'They have hewn for themselves cisterns, broken
cisterns that can hold no water.' 'Their webs shall not become
garments.' That may want a word of explanation. The metaphor is this.
You are all like spiders spinning carefully and diligently your web.
There is not substance enough in it to make a coat out of. You will
never cover yourselves with the product of your own brains or your own
efforts. There is no clothing in the spider's webs of a godless life.
Ah! brother, all these earthly aims which some of my friends listening
to me now have for the _sole_ aims of their lives, are as foolish
and as inadequate to accomplish that which is sought for by them, as
it would be to seek to quench raging thirst by lifting to the lips a
golden cup that is empty. Some of us have a whole sideboard full of
such, and vary our pursuits according to inclination and task. Some of
us have only one such, but they are all empty, and the lip is parched
after the cup has been lifted to it as it was before.
II. And so, consider now, secondly, the foolish ignorance that makes
the toil tiresome.
The metaphor of my text says that the reason why the 'fool' is so
wearied after the day's march is that he does not in the morning
settle where he is going, and how he is to get there; and so, having
started to go nowhither, he has got where he started for. He 'does not
know how to go to the city'--which, being translated into plain and
unmetaphorical English, is just this, that many men wreck their lives
for want of a clear sight of their true aim, and of the way to secure
it.
There is nothing more tragical than the absence, in the great bulk of
men, of anything like deliberate, definite views as to their aim in
life, and the course to be taken to secure it. There are two things
obviously necessary for success in any enterprise. One is, that there
shall be the most definite and clear conception of what is aimed at;
and the other, that there shall be a wisely considered plan to get at
it. Unless there be these, if you go at random, running a little way
for a moment in this direction, and then heading about and going in
the other, you cannot expect to get to the goal.
Now, what I want to ask some of my friends here is, Did you ever give
ten deliberate minutes to try to face for yourselves, and put into
plain words, what you are living for, and how you mean to secure it?
Of course I know that you have given thought and planning in plenty to
the nearer aims, without which material life cannot be lived at all. I
do not suppose that anybody here is chargeable with not having thought
enough about how to get on in business, or in their chosen walk of
life. It is not that kind of aim which I mean at all; but it is a
point beyond it that I want to press upon you. You are like men who
would carefully victual a ship and take the best information for their
guide as to what course to lie, and had never thought what they were
going to do when they got to the port. So you say, 'I am going to be
such-and-such a thing.' Well, what then? 'Well, I am going to lay
myself out for success.' Be it commercial, be it intellectual, be it
social, be it in the sphere of the affections, or whatever it may be.
Well, what then? 'Well, then I am going to advance in material
prosperity, I hope, or in wisdom, or to be surrounded by loving faces
of children and those that are dear to me.' What then? 'Then I am
going to die.' What then?
It is not till you get to that last question, and have faced it and
answered it, that you can be said to have taken the whole sweep of the
circumstances into view, and regulated your course according to the
dictates of common sense and right reason. And a terribly large number
of us live with careful adaptation of means to ends in regard of all
the smaller and more immediately to be realised aims of life, but have
never faced the larger question which reduces all these smaller aims
to insignificance. The simple child's interrogation which in the
well-known ballad ripped the tinsel off the skeleton, and showed war
in its hideousness, strips many of your lives of all pretence to be
reasonable. 'What good came of it at the last?' Can you answer the
question that the infant lips asked, and say, 'This good will come of
it at last. That I shall have God for my own, and Jesus Christ in my
heart'?
Brother! if I could only get you to this point, that you would take
half an hour now to think over what you ought to be, and to ask
yourself whether your aims in life correspond to what your aims should
be, I should have done more than I am afraid I shall do with some of
you. The naturalist can tell when he picks up a skeleton something of
the habits and the element of the creature to which it belonged. If it
has a hollow _sternum_ he knows it is meant to fly. On your
nature is impressed unmistakably that your destiny is not to creep,
but to soar. Not in vain does the Westminster Catechism lay the
foundation of everything in this, the prime question for all men,
'What is the chief end of man?' Ask that, and do not rest till you
have answered it.
Then there is another idea connected with this ignorance of my
text--viz. that it is the result of folly. Now the words 'folly' and
'foolish' and 'foolishness,' and their opposites, 'wisdom' and 'wise,'
in this Book of Ecclesiastes, as in the Book of Proverbs, do not mean
merely dull stupidity intellectually, which is a thing for which a man
is to be pitied rather than to be blamed, but they always carry
besides the idea of intellectual defect, also the idea of moral
obliquity. 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom'; and,
conversely, the absence of that fear is the foundation of that which
this writer stigmatises as 'folly' He is not merely sneering at men
with small brains and little judgments. There may be plenty of us who
are so, and yet are wise unto salvation and possessed of a far higher
wisdom than that of this world. But he tells us that so strangely
intertwined are the intellectual and moral parts of our nature, that
wheresoever there is the obscuration of the latter there is sure to be
the perversion of the former, and the man knows not 'how to go to the
city' because he is 'foolish.'
That is to say, you go wrong in your judgment about your conduct
because you have gone wrong morally. And your blunders about life, and
your ignorance of its true end and aim, and your mistakes as to how to
secure happiness and blessedness, are your own faults, and are owing
to the aversion of your nature from that which is highest and noblest,
even God and His service. Therefore you are not only to be pitied
because you are out of the road, but to be blamed because you have
darkened the eyes of your mind by loving the darkness rather than the
light. And you 'do not know how to go to the city,' because you do not
want to go to the city, and would rather huddle here in the
wilderness, and live upon its poor supplies, than pass within the
golden gates. My brethren! the folly which blinds a man to his true
aim and mission in life is a folly which has in it the darker aspect
of sin, and is punishable as such.