The two sad metaphors, _slumberers_ and _dead_, are applied to the same
persons. There must, therefore, be some latitude in the application of
the figures and they must be confined in their interpretation to some
one or more points in which sleep and death are alike.
Now we all know that, as the proverb says, 'sleep is the image of
death.' And what is the point of comparison? Mainly this, that the
sleeper and the corpse are alike unconscious of an external world,
unable to receive impressions from it, or to put forth action on it; and
there, as I take it, is especially the point which is in the Apostle's
view.
The sleeper and the dead man alike are in the midst of an order of
things of which they are all unaware. And you and I live in two worlds,
one, this low, fleeting, material one; and the other the white, snowy
peaks that girdle it as do the Alps the Lombard plains; and men live all
unconscious of that which lies on their horizon. But the metaphor of a
level ground encircled by mountains does not fully represent the
closeness of the connection between these two worlds, of both of which
every one of us is a denizen. For on all sides, pressing in upon us,
enfolding us like an atmosphere, penetrating into all the material,
underlying all which is visible, all of which has its roots in the
unseen, is that world which the mass of men are in a conspiracy to
ignore and forget. And just as the sleeper is unconscious of all around
him in his chamber, and of all the stir and beauty of the world in which
he lives, so the bulk of us go blind and darkling through life, absorbed
in the things seen, and never lift even a momentary and lack-lustre
glance to the august realities which lie behind these, and give them all
their significance and beauty.
Yes; and just as in a dream men are busy with baseless phantoms that
vanish and are forgotten, and seem to themselves to be occupied, whilst
all the while they are lying prone and passive, so the mass of us are
sleep-walkers. What are many men who will be hurrying on to the
Manchester Exchange on Tuesday? What are they but men who are dreaming
that they are at work, but are only at work on dreams which will vanish
when the eyes are opened? Practical men, who are busy and absorbed with
affairs and with the things of this present, curl their lips about
'idealists' of all sorts, be they idealists of thought, or of art, or of
benevolence, or of religion, and call them dreamers. The boot is on the
other leg. It is the idealists that are awake, and it is you people that
live for to-day, and have not learned that to-day is a little fragment
and sliver of eternity--it is you who are dreamers, and all these things
round about us--the solid-seeming realities--are illusions, and
'Like the bubbles on a river,
Sparkling, bursting, borne away,'
they will disappear. There is only one reality, and that is God, and the
only lives that lay hold of the substance are those which grasp Him. The
rest of you are shadows hunting for shadows.
The two metaphors of my text coincide in suggesting another thing, and
that is the awful contrast in the average life between what is in a man
and what comes out of him. 'Dormant power,' we talk about. Ah, how
tragically the true man is dormant in all the work of worldly hearts!
God has made a great mistake in making you what you are, if there is no
place for you to exercise your powers in but this present world, and
nothing to exercise them on except the things that pass and perish.
Travellers in lands where civilisation used to be, and barbarism now is,
find sculptured stones from temples turned into fences for cattle-sheds
and walls round pigstyes. And that is something like what men do with
the faculties that God has given them. Why, the best part of you,
brother, if you are not a Christian, and living a Christian life--the
best part of you is asleep, and it is only the lower nature of you that
is awake! Sometimes the sleepers stir uneasily. It used to be said that
earthquakes were caused by a giant rolling himself from side to side in
his troubled slumber. And there are earthquakes in your heart and
spirit caused by the half-waking of the dormant self, the true man, who
is immersed and embruted in sense and the things of time. Some of you by
earthly lusts, some of you by over-indulgence in fleshly appetites,
eating and drinking and the like; some of you by absorption in the mere
externals of trade and profession and occupation to the entire neglect
of the inward thing which would glorify and exalt these--but all of us
somehow, unless we are living for God, have lulled our best, true,
central self into slumber, and lie as if dead.
Now, brethren, do not forget that this exhortation of my text, and
therefore this description, is addressed to a community of professing
Christians. I hope you will not misunderstand me as if I thought that
such a picture as I have been trying to draw applies only to men that
have no religion in them at all. It applies in varying degrees to men
that have, as--I was going to say the bulk, but perhaps that is
exaggeration, let me say a tragically large number--of professing
Christians, and a proportionate number of the professing Christians in
this audience have, a little life and a great circumference of death.
Dear brethren, you may call yourselves, and may be Christian people, and
have somewhat shaken off the torpor, and roused yourself from the
slumbering death of which I have been speaking. Remember that it still
hangs to you, and that it was of Christians that the Master said:
'Whilst the Lord was away they all slumbered and slept'; and that it was
of a Christian Church, and not of a pagan world, that the same voice
from heaven said: 'Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.' And
so I beseech you, bear with me, and do not think I am scolding, or
flinging about wild words at random, when I make a very earnest appeal
to each individual professing, and real, Christian in this congregation,
and ask them to consider, each for themselves, how much of sleep is
still in their drowsy eyes, and how far it is true that the quickening
life of Jesus Christ has penetrated, as the sunbeams into the darkness,
into the heavy mass of their natural death.