The question of our text implies, as we have already suggested, that our
whole lives, with all their various and often opposite experiences, are
yet an ordered whole, having a definite end. There is some purpose
beyond the moment to be served. Our joys and our sorrows, our gains and
our losses, the bright hours and the dark hours, and the hours that are
neither eminently bright nor supremely dark, our failures and our
successes, our hopes disappointed or fulfilled, and all the infinite
variety of condition and environment through which our varying days and
years have led us, co-operate for one end. It is life that makes men;
the infant is a bundle of possibilities, and as the years go on, one
possible avenue of development after another is blocked. The child might
have been almost anything; the man has become hardened and fixed into
one shape.
But all this variety of impulses and complicated experiences need the
co-operation of the man himself if they are to reach their highest
results in him. If he is simply recipient of these external forces
acting upon him, they will shape him indeed, but he will be a poor
creature. Life does not make men unless men take the command of life,
and he who lets circumstances and externals guide him, as the long water
weeds in a river are directed by its current, will, from the highest
point of view, have experienced the variations of a lifetime in vain.
No doubt each of our experiences has its own immediate and lower purpose
to serve, and these purposes are generally accomplished, but beyond
these each has a further aim which is not reached without diligent
carefulness and persistent effort on our parts. If we would be sure of
what it is to suffer life's experiences in vain, we have but to ask
ourselves what life is given us for, and we all know that well enough to
be able to judge how far we have used life to attain the highest ends of
living. We may put these ends in various ways in our investigation of
the results of our manifold experiences. Let us begin with the
lowest--we received life that we might learn truth, then if our
experience has not taught us wisdom it has been in vain. It is
deplorable to have to look round and see how little the multitude of men
are capable of forming anything like an independent and intelligent
opinion, and how they are swayed by gusts of passion, by blind
prejudice, by pretenders and quacks of all sorts. It is no less sad for
us to turn our eyes within and discover, perhaps not without surprise
and shame, how few of what we are self-complacent enough to call our
opinions are due to our own convictions.
If we ever are honest enough with ourselves to catch a glimpse of our
own unwisdom, the question of our text will press heavily upon us, and
may help to make us wiser by teaching us how foolish we are. An infinite
source of wisdom is open to us, and all the rich variety of our lives'
experiences has been lavished on us to help us, and what have we made of
it all?
But we may rise a step higher and remember that we are made moral
creatures. Therefore, whatever has not developed infant potentialities
in us, and made them moral qualities, has been experienced in vain. 'Not
enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end and way.' Life is meant to
make us love and do the good, and unless it has produced that effect on
us, it has failed. If this be true, the world is full of failures, like
the marred statues in a bad sculptor's studio, and we ourselves have
earnestly to confess that the discipline of life has too often been
wasted upon us, and that of us the divine complaint from of old has been
true: 'In vain have I smitten thy children, they have received no
correction.'
There is no sadder waste than the waste of sorrow, and alas! we all know
how impotent our afflictions have been to make us better. But not
afflictions only have failed in their appeal to us, our joys have as
often been in vain as our sorrows, and memory, when it turns its lamp on
the long past, sees so few points at which life has taught us to love
goodness, and be good, that she may well quench her light and let the
dead past bury its dead.
But we must rise still higher, and think of men as being made for God,
and as being the only creatures known to us who are capable of religion.
'Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.' And this
chief end is in fullest harmony with the lower ends to which we have
just referred, and they will never be realised in their fullest
completeness unless that completeness is sought in this the chief end.
From of old meditative souls have known that the beginning of wisdom is
the fear of the Lord, and that that fear is as certainly the beginning
of goodness. It was not an irrelevant rebuke to the question, 'What good
thing shall I do?' when Jesus set the eager young soul who asked it, to
justify to himself his courteous and superficial application to Him of
the abused and vulgarised title of 'Good,' and pointed him to God as the
only Being to whom that title, in its perfectness, could be given. If
'there is none good but one, that is God,' man's goodness must be drawn
from Him, and morality without religion will in theory be incomplete,
and in practice a delusion. If, then, men are made to need God, and
capable of possessing Him, and of being possessed by Him, then the great
question for all of us is, has life, with all its rapid whirl of
changing circumstance and varying fortunes, drawn us closer to God, and
made us more fit to receive more of Him? So supreme is this chief end
that a life which has not attained it can only be regarded as 'in vain'
whatever other successes it may have attained. So unspeakably more
important and necessary is it, that compared with it all else sinks into
nothingness; hence many lives which are dazzling successes in the eyes
of men are ghastly failures in reality.
Now, if we take these plain principles with us in our retrospect of the
past year we shall be launched on a very serious inquiry, and brought
face to face with a very penitent answer. Some of us may have had great
sorrows, and the tears may be scarcely dry upon our cheeks: some of us
may have had great gladnesses, and our hearts may still be throbbing
with the thrill: some of us may have had great successes, and some of us
heavy losses, but the question for us to ask is not of the quality of
our past experiences, but as to their effects upon us. Has life been so
used by us as to help us to become wiser, better, more devout? And the
answer to that question, if we are honest in our scrutiny of ourselves,
and if memory has not been a mere sentimental luxury, must be that we
have too often been but unfaithful recipients alike of God's mercies and
God's chastisements, and have received much of the discipline of life,
and remained undisciplined. The question of our text, if asked by me,
would be impertinent, but it is asked of each of us by the stern voice
of conscience, and for some of us by the lips of dear ones whose loss
has been among our chiefest sufferings. God asks us this question, and
it is hard to make-believe to Him.