Of course the first application of such words is to purely sensuous
delights.
Men who seek to make life a mere revel and banquet.
Nothing is so short-lived as gratification of appetite. It is not
merely that each act lasts but for a moment, but also that past
gratifications leave no sort of solace to the appetite behind them;
whereas past acquirements or deeds of goodness are a perpetual joy as
well as the foundation of the present. There is something essentially
isolated in each act of sensuous delight. No man can by so willing
recall the taste of eaten food, nor slake his thirst by remembrance of
former draughts, or cool himself by thinking of 'frosty Caucasus.' But
each such gratification is done when it is done, and there is an end of
its power to gratify.
Further, the power of enjoyment wanes, though the lust for it waxes.
Hence each act has less and less power of satisfying.
One sees _blase_ young men of twenty-five. It was a man of under
thirty-five who wrote, 'Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.' It
was a used-up _roue_ that was represented as saying, 'Vanity of
vanities, all is vanity.' It was of sensuous 'pleasures' that poor
Burns wrote,--
'Like the snowfall in the river,
A moment white,--then melts for ever.'
When a people is given over to such excess, late or soon the fate of
Samaria comes upon them. Think of the French Revolution or of the fall
of Rome, and learn that the prophet was announcing a law for all
nations, in his fiery denunciation, and one which holds good to-day as
ever.
But we may generalise more widely. Every godless life is essentially
transitory; of course, all life is so in one view. But suppose two men,
working side by side at the same occupation, passing through the same
circumstances. So far as physical changes go, these men are the same.
Both lose much. Both leave behind much. Both cease to be interested in
much that was dear to them. Both die at last, and leave it all. Is
there any difference? The transitoriness is the same, and the eternal
consequences are eternal alike in both; and yet there is a very solemn
sense in which the one man's life has utterly perished, and the other's
abides. Suppose a man, educated to be a first-rate man of business,
dies. Which of his trained faculties will he have scope for in that new
order of things? Or a student, or a lawyer, or a statesman?
Oh, it is not our natural mortality that makes these thoughts so awful;
but it is the thought that the man who is doing these things is
immortal. The head which wears the fading wreath will live for ever.
'What will ye do in the end?'