'What will ye do in the end?'--JER. v. 31.
I find that I preached to the young from this text just thirty years
since--nearly a generation ago. How few of my then congregation are
here to-night! how changed they and I are! and how much nearer the
close we have drifted! How many of the young men and women of that
evening have gone to meet the end, and how many of them have wrecked
their lives because they would not face and answer this question!
Ah, dear young friends, if I could bring some of the living and some of
the dead, and set them to witness here instead of me, they would burn
in on you, as my poor words never can do, the insanity of living
without a satisfactory and sufficient reply to the question of my text,
'What will ye do in the end?'
In its original application these words referred to a condition of
religious and moral corruption in which a whole nation was involved.
The men that should have spoken for God were 'prophesying lies.' The
priests connived at profitable falsehoods because by these their rule
was confirmed. And the deluded populace, as is always the case,
preferred smooth falsehoods to stern truths. So the prophet turns round
indignantly, and asks what can be the end of such a welter and carnival
of vice and immorality, and beseeches his contemporaries to mend their
ways by bethinking themselves of what their course led to.
But we may dismiss the immediate application of the words for the sake
of looking at the general principle which underlies them. It is a very
familiar and well-worn one. It is simply this, that a large part of the
wise conduct of life depends on grave consideration of consequences. It
is a sharp-pointed question, that pricks many a bubble, and brings much
wisdom down into the category of folly. There would be less misery in
the world, and fewer fair young lives cast away upon grim rocks, if the
question of my text were oftener asked and answered.
I. I note, first, that here is a question which every wise man will ask
himself.
I do not mean to say that the consideration of consequences is the
highest guide, nor that it is always a sufficient one; nor that it is,
by any means, in every case, an easily applied one. For we can all
conceive of circumstances in which it is the plainest duty to take a
certain course of action, knowing that, as far as this life is
concerned, it will bring down disaster and ruin. Do right! and face
_any_ results therefrom. He who is always forecasting possible issues
has a very leaden rule of conduct, and will be so afraid of results
that he will not dare to move; and his creeping prudence will often
turn out to be the truest imprudence.
But whilst all that is true, and many deductions must be made from the
principle which I have laid down, that the consideration of
circumstances is a good guide in life, yet there are regions in which
the question comes home with direct and illuminating force. Let me just
illustrate one or two of these.
Take the lower application of the question to nearer ends in life. Now
this awful life that we live is so strangely concatenated of causes and
effects, and each little deed drags after it such a train of eternal
and ever-widening consequences, that a man must be an idiot if he never
looks an inch beyond his nose to see the bearing of his actions. I
believe that, in the long-run, and in the general, condition is the
result of character and of conduct; and that, whatsoever deductions may
be necessary, yet, speaking generally, and for the most part, men are
the architects of their own condition, and that they make the houses
that they dwell in to fit the convolutions of the body that dwells
within them. And, that being so, it being certain that 'whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap,' and that no deed, be it ever so
small, be it ever so evanescent, be it ever so entirely confined within
our own inward nature, and never travelling out into visibility in what
men call actions--that every one of such produces an eternal, though it
may be an all but imperceptible effect, upon ourselves; oh, surely
there can be nothing more ridiculous than that a man should refrain
from forecasting the issue of his conduct, and saying to himself? 'What
am I to do in the end?'
If you would only do that in regard to hosts of things in your daily
life you _could_ not be the men and women that you are. If the lazy
student would only bring clearly before his mind the examination-room,
and the unanswerable paper, and the bitter mortification when the
pass-list comes out and his name is not there, he would not trifle and
dawdle and seek all manner of diversions as he does, but he would bind
himself to his desk and his task. If the young man who begins to tamper
with purity, and in the midst of the temptations of a great city to
gratify the lust of the eye and the lust of the flesh, because he is
away from the shelter of his father's house, and the rebuke of his
mother's purity, could see, as the older of us have seen, men with
their bones full of the iniquity of their youth, or drifted away from
the city to die, down in the country like a rat in a hole, do you think
the temptations of the streets and low places of amusement would not be
stripped of their fascination? If the man beginning to drink were to
say to himself, 'What am I to do in the end?' when the craving becomes
physical, and volition is suspended, and anything is sacrificed in
order to still the domineering devil within, do you think he would
begin? I do not believe that all sin comes from ignorance, but sure I
am that if the sinful man saw what the end is he would, in nine cases
out of ten, be held back. 'What will ye do in the end?' Use that
question, dear friends, as the Ithuriel spear which will touch the
squatting tempter at your ear, and there will start up, in its own
shape, the fiend.
But the main application that I would ask you to make of the words of
my text is in reference to the final end, the passing from life. Death,
the end, is likewise Death, the beginning. If it were an absolute end,
as coarse infidelity pretends to believe it is, then, of course, such a
question as my text would have no kind of relevance. 'What will ye do
in the end?' 'Nothing! for I shall be nothing. I shall just go back to
the nonentity that I was. I do not need to trouble myself.' Ah, but
Janus has two faces, one turned to the present and one to the future.
His temple has two gates, one which admits from this lower level, and
one, at the back, which launches us out on to the higher level. The end
is a beginning, and the beginning is retribution. The end of sowing is
the beginning of harvest. The man finishes his work and commences to
live on his wages. The brewing is over, and the drinking of the brewst
commences.
And so, brother, 'What will ye do in the end--which is not an end, but
which is a beginning? 'Surely every wise man will take that question
into consideration. Surely, if it be true that we all of us are
silently drifting to that one little gateway through which we have to
pass one by one, and then find ourselves in a region all full of
consequences of the present, he has a good claim to be counted a prince
of fools who 'jumps the life to come,' and, in all his calculations of
consequences, which he applies wisely and prudently to the trifles of
the present, forgets to ask himself, 'And, after all that is done, what
shall I do then?' You remember the question in the old ballad:
"'What good came of it at last?' ...
'Nay, that I cannot tell,' quoth he;
But 'twas a famous victory.'"
Ay, but what came of it at the last? Oh brother, that one question,
pushed to its issues, condemns the wisdom of this world as folly, and
pulverises into nothingness millions of active lives and successful
schemes. What then? What then? 'I have much goods laid up for many
years.' Well and good, what then? 'I will say to my soul, Take thine
ease, eat, drink, and be merry.' Yes, what then? 'This night thy soul
shall be required of thee.' He never thought of that! And so his
epitaph was 'Thou fool!'
II. So, secondly, mark, here is a question which a great many of us
never think about.
I do not mean, now, so much in reference to the nearer ends compassed
in this life, though even in regard to them it is only too true; I mean
rather in regard to that great and solemn issue to which we are all
tending. But in regard of both, it seems to me one of the strangest
things in all the world that men should be content so commonly to be
ignorant of what they perfectly well know, and never to give attention
to that of which, should they bethink themselves, they are absolutely
certain.
'What will ye do in the end?' Why! half of us put away that question
with the thought in our minds, if not expressed, at least most
operative, 'There is not going to be any end; and it is always going to
be just like what it is to-day.' Did you ever think that there is no
good ground for being sure that the sun will rise to-morrow; that it
rose for the first time once; that there will come a day when it will
rise for the last time? The uniformity of Nature may be a postulate,
but you cannot find any logical basis for it. Or, to come down from
heights of that sort, have you ever laid to heart, brother, that the
only unchangeable thing in this world is change, and the only thing
certain, that there is no continuance of anything; and that, therefore,
you and I are bound, if we are wise, to look that fact in the face, and
not to allow ourselves to be befooled by the difficulty of imagining
that things will ever be different from what they are? Oh! many of
us--I was going to say most of men, I do not know that it would be an
exaggeration--are like the careless inhabitants of some of those sunny,
volcanic isles in the Eastern Ocean, where Nature is prodigally
luxuriant and all things are fair, but every fifty years or so there
comes a roar and the island shakes, and half of it, perhaps, is
overwhelmed, and the lava flows down and destroys gleaming houses and
smiling fields, and heaven is darkened with ashes, and then everything
goes on as before, and people live as if it was never going to happen
again, though every morning, when they go out, they see the cone
towering above their houses, and the thin column of smoke, pale against
the blue sky.
It is not altogether sinful or bad that we should live, to some extent,
under the illusion of a fixity and a perpetuity which has no real
existence, for it helps to concentrate effort and to consolidate habit,
and to make life possible. But for men to live, as so many of us do,
never thinking of what is more certain than anything else about us,
that we shall slide out of this world, and find ourselves in another,
is surely not the part of wisdom.
Another reason why so many of us shirk this question is the lamentable
want of the habit of living by principle and reflection. Most men never
see their life steadily, and see it whole. They live from hand to
mouth, they are driven this way and that way; they adapt means to ends
In regard to business or the like, but in the formation of their
character, and in the moulding of their whole being, crowds of them
live a purely mechanical, instinctive, unreflective life. There is
nothing more deplorable than the small extent to which reflection and
volition really shape the lives of the bulk of mankind. Most of us take
our cue from our circumstances, letting them dominate us. They tell us
that in Nature there is such a thing as protective mimicry, as it is
called-animals having the power--some of them to a much larger extent
than others--of changing their hues in order to match the gravel of the
stream in which they swim or the leaves of the trees on which they
feed. That is like what a great many of us do. Put us into a place
where certain forms of frivolity or vice are common, and we go in for
them. Take us away from these and we change our hue to something a
little whiter. But all through we never know what it is to put forth a
good solid force of resistance and to say, 'No! I will not!' or, what
is sometimes quite as hard to say, 'Yes! though,' as Luther said in his
strong way, 'there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on
the housetops, I will!' If people would live more by reflection and by
the power of a resisting will, this question of my text would come
oftener to them.
And there is another cause that I must touch on for one moment, why so
many people neglect this question, and that is because they are
uneasily conscious that they durst not face it. I know of no stranger
power than that by which men can ignore unwelcome questions; and I know
of nothing more tragical than the fact that they choose to exercise the
power. What would you think of a man who never took stock because he
knew that he was insolvent, and yet did not want to know it? And what
do you think of yourselves if, knowing that the thought of passing into
that solemn eternity is anything but a cheering one, and that you have
to pass thither, you never turn your head to look at it? Ah, brother,
if it be true that this question of my text is unpleasant to you to
hear put, be sure that that is the strongest reason why you should put
it.