'Would God it were evening!'
By the martyr amid the flames,
'Come quickly, Lord Jesus!'
But all in vain. We cannot expand the moments to hours, nor compress
the hours to moments. Leaden or winged, the hours are hours. The
cold-blooded pendulum ticks on, equable and unaltered, and after sixty
minutes, no sooner and no later, the hour strikes. 'There is a time for
every purpose.'
How solemn is the thought of that constant process! It goes on for
ever, like the sea fog creeping up from the wide ocean and burying life
and sunshine in its fatal folds, or like the ever-flowing river, or
like the fall plunging over the edge of the cliff, or like the motions
of the midnight sky. Each moment in its turn passes into the colourless
stony past, and the shadow creeps up the hillside.
And how unnoticed it is! We only know motion by the jolts. The
revolution of the earth and its rush along its orbit are unfelt by us.
We are constantly startled to feel how long ago such and such a thing
took place. The mother sees her little girl at her knee, and in a few
days, as it seems, finds her a woman. How immense is our life in the
prospect, how awfully it collapses in the retrospect! Only by seeing
constellation after constellation set, do we know that the heavens are
in motion. We have need of an effort of serious reflection to realise
that it is of _us_ and of _our_ lives that all these old commonplaces
are true.
That constant, unnoticed progress has an end. Our life is a definite
period, having a bounded past behind it, a present, and a bounded
future before it. We have a sandglass and it runs out. We are like men
sliding down a rope or hauling a boat towards a fixed point. The sea is
washing away our sandy island, and is creeping nearer and nearer to
where we stand, and will wash over us soon. No cries, nor prayers, nor
wishes will avail. It is vain for _us_ to say, 'Sun! stand thou still!'