The old, old comparison of life to a journey is very natural and very
pathetic. It expresses life's ceaseless change; every day carries us
into a new scene, every day the bends of the road shut out some happy
valley where we fain would have rested, every day brings new faces, new
associations, new difficulties, and even if the same recur, yet it is
with such changes that they are substantially new, and of each day's
march it is true, even when life is most monotonous, that 'ye have not
passed this way heretofore.' It expresses life's ceaseless effort and
constant plodding. To-day's march does not secure to-morrow's rest,
but, however footsore and weary, we have to move on, like some child
dragged along by a careless nurse. It expresses the awful crumbling
away of life beneath us. The road has an end, and each step takes us
nearer to it. The numbers that face us on the milestones slowly and
surely decrease; we pass the last and on we go, tramp, tramp, and we
cannot stop till we reach the narrow chamber, cold and dark, where, at
any rate, we have got the long march over.
But to many men, the journey of life is one which has no definite
direction deliberately chosen, which has no all-inclusive aim, which
has no steady progress. There may be much running hither and thither,
but it is as aimless as the marchings of a fly upon a window, as busy
and yet as uncertain as that of the ants who bustle about on an
ant-hill.
Now that is the idea, which our text implies, of all the activity of a
godless life, that it is not a steady advance to a chosen goal, but a
rushing up and down in a trackless desert, with many immense exertions
all thrown away. Then, in contrast, it puts this great thought: that
God has come to us and made for us a path for our feet.