Scripture abounds in other metaphors for the same solemn spiritual
facts as are set before us in this picture of the dying watchfire and
the sad men watching its decline. Godless lives draw from broken
cisterns out of which the water runs. They build with untempered
mortar. They lean on broken reeds that wound the hand pressed on them.
They spend money for that which is not bread. But all these metaphors
put together do not tell all the vanity, disappointments, and final
failure and ruin of such a life. That last glimpse given in the text of
the sorrowful sleeper stretched by the black ashes, with darkness round
and hopeless heaviness within, points to an issue too awful to be dwelt
on by a preacher, and too awful not to be gravely considered by each of
us for himself.