It is so because you are specially tempted to forget it. It may seem as
if there were no people in the world that had less need to be appealed
to, as I have been appealing to you, by motives drawn from the end of
life, than you who are only standing at its beginning. But it is not
so. An old rabbi was once asked by his pupil when he should fulfil a
certain precept of the law, and the answer was, 'The day before you
die.' 'But,' said the disciple, 'I may die to-morrow.' 'Then,' said the
master, 'do it to-day.' And so I say to you, do not make sure that the
beginning at which you stand is separated by a long tract of years from
the end to which you go. It may be, but it may not be. I know that
arguments pleading with men to be Christians, and drawn from the
consideration of a future life, are not fashionable nowadays, but I am
persuaded that that preaching of the Gospel is seriously defective, and
will be lamentably ineffective, which ignores this altogether. And,
therefore, dear friends, I say to you that, although in all human
probability a stretch of years may lie between you and the end of life,
the question of my text is one specially adapted to you.
And it is so because, with your buoyancy, with your necessarily limited
experience, with the small accumulation of results that you have
already in your possession, and with the tendencies of your age to live
rather by impulse than by reflection, you are specially tempted to
forget the solemn significance of this interrogation. And it is a
question especially for you, because you have special advantages in the
matter of putting it. We older people are all fixed and fossils, as you
are very fond of telling us. The iron has cooled and gone into rigid
shapes with us. It is all fluent with you. You may become pretty nearly
what you like. I do not mean in regard to circumstances: other
considerations come in to determine these; but circumstances are
second, character is first; and I do say, in regard to character, you
young folk have all but infinite possibilities before you; and, I
repeat, may become almost anything that you set yourselves to be. You
have no long, weary trail of failures behind you, depressing and
seeming to bring an entail of like failure with them for the future.
You have not yet acquired habits--those awful things that may be our
worst foes or our best friends--you have not yet acquired habits that
almost smother the power of reform and change. You have, perhaps, years
before you in which you may practise the lessons of wisdom and
self-restraint which this question fairly fronted would bring. And so I
lay it on your hearts, dear young friends. I have little hope of the
old people. I do not despair of any, God forbid! but the fact remains
that the most of the men who have done anything for God and the world
worth doing have been under the influence of Christian principle in
their early days. And from fifteen to one or two and twenty is the
period in which you get the set which, in all likelihood, you will
retain through eternity. So, 'What will ye do in the end?' Answer the
question whilst yet it is possible to answer it, with a stretch of
years before you in which you may work out the conclusions to which the
answer brings.
IV. And that leads me to say, last of all, and but a word, that here is
a question which Jesus Christ alone enables a man to answer with calm
confidence.
As I have said, the end is a beginning; the passage from life is the
entrance on a progressive and eternal state of retribution. And Jesus
Christ tells us two other things. He tells us that that state has two
parts; that in one there is union with Him, life, blessedness for ever;
and that in the other there is darkness, separation from Him, death,
and misery. These are the facts, as revealed by the incarnate Word of
God, on which answers to this question must be shaped.
'What will ye do in the end?' If I am trusting to Him; if I have
brought my poor, weak nature and sinful soul to Him, and cast them upon
His merciful sacrifice and mighty intercession and life-giving Spirit,
then I can say: 'As for me, I shall behold Thy face in righteousness; I
shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.' Ay, and what about
those who do not take Him for their Prince and their Saviour? 'What
will _ye_ do in the end?' When life's illusions are over, when all its
bubbles are burst, when conscience awakes, and when you stand to give
an account of yourself to God, 'What will ye do in the end' which is a
beginning? 'Can thy heart endure and thy hand be strong in the day that
I shall deal with thee?' Oh brother, do not turn away from that Christ
who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending! If you
will cleave to Him, then you may let the years and weeks slip away
without regret; and whether the close be far off or near, death will be
robbed of all its terrors, and the future so filled with blessedness,
that of you the wise man's paradox will be true: 'Better is the end of
a thing than the beginning, and the day of death than the day of birth.'