The Amaranth: Or, Immortality
When summer was in its noon, what a life was on the lawn, — what a stir was in tho trees! But already that stir is hushed, — that life is dead. Along with the bees and the butterflies, the leaves have been shaken from the boughs and are entangled among the matted grass or trodden in the mire. And as soon as these withered waifs began to flutter through the darkejiing air, the birds of passage took their flight, and on the wings of the equinox joy sped away to balmier climes.
How wide the desolation! how like our human history! On the trunk of the last century there swarmed a life so fresh and verdant that it felt as if it could not fade
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tut the clcatli-wlnd lias blown and torn from their places the master-spirits of that time. And in the promenades, and ball-rooms, and public gardens of that day, what a blaze of beauty, — what a burst of full-blown fashion! Where is it now? Beneath the churchyard sod; like heaps of withered .leaves, drifted into the fiimily vault or obscurely mingled with promiscuous clay; and here and there a tattered survivor, like a funeral pennon, clinging to the desolated bough.
The hay-field, the flower-garden, the forest, — each is an emblem of our death - doomed generations. But more pensive still than this simultaneous decay is the fading of the individual flower. You cherished it in your cnamoer window. Perhaps an invalid yourself, you were glad at the first promise of a blossom. That bud expanded, and along with it your own heart seemed to open. Its exotic odour brought you hints of warmer, brighter regions, and its petals so soft anu pufe, sent up your thoughts to the home of the angels. But no morrow saw its loveliness repeated-Next day it already drooped, and a few day* more the glory was departed, — the withered
148 EMBLEMS rnOM EDEN.
slirub was carried out to the dead flowers* mausoleum.
The friend with whom you take sweet counsel, — the brightest and dearest presence in your home, — you yourself are such a fading flower. And there are times when the thought comes over you quite agonisingly, “All flesh is grass, and the goodliness thereof as the flower of the grass.” This terrible mortality!. They drop on every side. It seems as if almost every morning you woke up to a world which contains a friend or two the fewer; and every morning’s post, every daily paper, is apt to tell some goodness that has passed away, some joy whose extinction has left the surrounding region dark and desolate. And the mourner is no less mortal. “We all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have carried us away.” Detached from the Tree of Life, behold our entire generation drifting to and fro. Ensconced behind the rock or lurking in the cranny, a few may escape a little while; and some may touch the verge and be snatched back again by the returning eddy. But the besom of Destruction plies its sleepless vans, and soon or late
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the last reluctant flatterer is blown across tho brink and disappears in the great eternity. It is appointed unto man to die; and the reprieve is very short. For with these mighty aspirations, and with all the possibilities of achievement and enjoyment, what are threescore years and ten? To such capacities as ours, — with a universe so vast and with our own adaptations so endless, — what a mere glimpse of existence io the best estate of man! As the Northumbrian noble said to King Edwin, “When the king and his guests are feasting round the fire on the stormy night, feelingnothing of the cold and forgetful of the wild winter weather, there darts through the hall a poor sparrow, in at one door and out at tho other; the moment which the bird spends in warmth and shelter is as nothing to the long time of the tempest. And so is the brief moment of our present life to that long tract which has gone before, and which is still to come.”* And were this the whole of it, — what a tantalising taste of the banquet of being, — what a flash through the cheerful realms of existence, and then to bo
Ncander, vol. v. p. 24.
o2
driven out into the blackness of darkness for
ever!
Profiting by the season and its solemnising influences, let us raise our thoughts from the decay and the dying which Nature exhibits to the life and immortality which the Gospel reveals. Or as we have both combined in that passage where St. Peter says, “Believers are born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, who liveth and abideth for ever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof fadeth away; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the Gospel is preached unto you,” — a passage in which the perpetuity of God’s truth is contrasted with the transitory state of man on earth, and in which the believer of God’s truth is represented as a partaker of God’s immortality.
When God created man. He did as when He created angels;- He formed a creature inspired with His own immortality, and designed to live for ever. But that creature sinned and died. God’s beloved Son assumed into
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union with His Godhead the soul of man and man’s body also. That soul kept sinless to the last, and that bodj spiritualised by its transit through the tomb, He has carried on high, and enthroned in His own Heaven; and in Himself as the first-fruits, He shows what a redeemed Humanity is capable of beceming and enjoying. In that incarnation of. His, however, — in that work of life-earning obedience and death -averting expiation, — as well as in that glorious ascension, — the Saviour was not solitary. He was not acting on Hij own behoof. He was a Second Adam, representing a numerous family and procuring for them afresh the gift of a forfeited immortality. Nor can words express how complete and copious is that life of which Immanuel is the great Recoverer, and which commences in the soul when quickened anew by the Holy Spirit the Comforter. But it is an abundant life: — a life in its amplitude of range and largeness of enjoyment, the image of its Author’s own: — a protected life, — a life really “insured,” — a life that can never more be forfeited, — a life identified with the Saviour’s own, and hid with Himself in God: — an endless life; a life which Gabriel himself will not outlive, and which derived directly from the great “Fountain of Life,” is lasting as God’s eternity.
“All flesh is grass,” but believers in Jesus are no longer mere “flesh.” They are partakers of a Divine nature. They are the children of an immortal Father, — the children of that God who liveth and abideth for ever. “To as many as received the Saviour, even to those who believed on His name, He gave the power to become the sons of God.” And as long as their Heavenly Father lives, they cannot die.
“The word of the Lord endureth for ever.” Our words come and go. We ourselves are always changing, and what was a genuine effusion of our hearts at one period of our history, may be no true index of our feelings afterwards. And circumstances vary. We find that we have been deceived in our estimate of character, and people turn out so different from what we took them once to be. The consequence is, that many of our past sayings are now a dead letter; and when reminded of an old promise, we are apt to feel that, were it to be repeated, we should not make that promise no-w. But the gifts and calling of God are without repentance; and when He proclaimed the fullest and freest Gospel to our world, He did not feel more propitious towards sinners of our race than He is feeling now. To His all-seeing eye the end was known from the beginning; and as no crime has evolved so tremendous as to modify the saying, “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin,” so no transgressor has arisen so gigantic as to limit the Divine forgiveness, or to form an exception in the Divine and world -embracing “Whosoever.” Among all the utterances of the Most High, and all the declarations of that Faithful Witness, His incarnate Son, there is not one which has faded into inanity or grown a dead letter; but, like the wise, holy, and Unchanging Speaker, each is a faithful saying, — a lively oracle, — vital with Divine significance, — like God Himself, a word that liveth and endureth for ever.
Reader, admit into your mind that Gospel, and it will fill you with its own immortality. From the dark grave of ungodliness it will raise you into the sunshine of God’s reconciled countenance, and breaking down the putrid vault of corruption and eartlilj’-mindedness, it will usher you into llie rcsurrectionlife of the new creation, — the pure pleasures and holy joys of God’s own children. — nay, into something of that beatific life with which God’s beloved Son is made glad for evermore. And with the living God for your Father, and the living Saviour for your Friend, and with the land of the living for your adopted country and expected home, you will verify those words of Jesus, “I am the Resurrection and the Life; whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
And just as the bleak weather sends us into our homes, and makes us thankful for the warmth and shelter we lately slighted, so separations, sorrow, felt infirmity, will send us back into these faithful sayings, and will make us gladly retreat into the truth of the Gospel; — a Gospel which has brought life and immortality to light, and which over against Nature*s death and desolation reveals an endless life, a deathless Saviour, an eternal God.
An endless life! In its ordinary on-going the hidden life may be too languid for the
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believer’s consciousness, and it may sometimes seem ready J;o die. But where the faithful saying is believed a new life exists, and the more implicitly and joyfully that Gospel is embraced the more abundantly does that new life mount up in the assured and exulting spirit, and manifest itself in the holy and. benignant deportment. And to not a few of God’s people has it been granted so to realise the blessedness beyond, that it almost seemed as if excess of life shook down the tabernacle, and as if the fittest sequel of the history, and the truest epitaph were to record that from that day, “Dcsiit mortalis esse.”*
A deathless Saviour! Jesus ‘• once dead dieth no more;” and it is not only to make intercession for us that He ever liveth, but to manage and administer all those matters which might cause our hearts to be troubled. You are going a long journey, and you deposit with some trusty friend your most valued effects, and if only he lives, you know that on your return you will get a good account of them. Or the night is pitchy dark, and
* The inscription on Dr. Jortin’s grave at Keosinston.
loG EMDLEIIS FROM EDEN.
you are stepping from the slippery bulwarks of the ship on to the steep acclivity of the unknown shore; and although between ship and shore there is an interval and a black abyss beneath, the extended hand which grasps your own is so powerful, and is accompanied by a voice so cordial and true, that without any tremor you spring forward and exchange your heaving barque for solid land. You are going the way of all the earth, and as there is no one else to whom you dare intrust it, in the words of the only Christian whose dying words Scripture has preserved, you cry, “Lord Jesus, into Thy hands I commend my spirit;” and as the anchor drops, and as from earthly life you step forth into the unknown Hereafter, you exclaim, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me,” for you know whom you are believing; the everlasting arms arc around you, and He who says, “Lo, I an? with you,” is able to keep you.
‘My friend, sincerely yours till death,* The world no farther goes; Perhaps, wliilc * earth to earth ’ is laid, A tear of pity flo’.vs.
Be thou, my Saviour, then my friend,
In thee my soul shall trust;
Who false wilt never prove in death,
Nor leave me in the dust,
“Home while my other friends return, All solemn, silent, sad; ^^’ith thee my flesh shall rest in hope, And all my bones be glad.” *
An eternal God! Yes; from the frailty nnil fugacity of the creature it is delightful to retreat into the permanence and constancy of the unchanging Jehovah; and how re-assuring and joyful to remember, that though the mountains depart, and the hills be removed, there is a kindness that will not depart, and a covenant that cannot be broken. After all, mutation and decay are the exception, not the rule — an incident in the history of the universe, which shall come to an end when, with one foot on the earth and another on the sea, a mighty angel swears, “There shall be no more Time.” It may be a mere moment in the howling winter-night that the little bird spends in the blazing banquet-hall; but before that winter began to bluster there was a sum- * Bishop Home.
mer in the world, und tlierc will be again a summer when winter storms have ceased to rave. In such a summer our earth commenced its course, and through the weary cycle, — though not long to Him with whom a thousand years arc as one day, — i! !s revolving back into the sunshine of its Creator’s blessing. Already the mid-winter of its grossest darkness, and its greatest crime, the murder of the Lord of glory, — that blackest, guiltiest hour is past; and streaks of dawn on the hills of darkness, and a few flowers appearing, promise day-break and a spring; and before the cycle is complete and the mystery is finished, with fairer scenes than Eden and one spot at least dearer to God than Eden ever knew, the redeemed and regenerate earth will find itself once more in the sunshine of its Creator’s countenance — a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
In that sleepless Wisdom and unchanging Goodness be it ours to acquiesce and rejoice; and if we quit this scene with any prayers unanswered, or any labours uncompleted, let it content us to know that the scene is still pervaded by a Presence which controls all events for the best, and which will perfect all that ought to be permanent. If events are not moving to our mind, — if they do not march to that short jingle which we call harmony, — let us remember that in God’s great anthem there are breaks and pauses, notes high and low, and passages very mournful, as well as others full of terrible majesty before we come to the triumphant outburst of the conclusive chorus. Meanwhile, from all intermediate frailty or decay, be it ours to retreat into His society who has been “the dweliing-place of His people in all generations;” and appropriating the words of Moses, the man of God, let us pray in the spirit of his most ancient psalm,
•’ O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come;
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
“Under the shadow of thy wings,
Still may we dwell secure;
Sufficient is thine arm alone.
And our defence is sure.”