Posthumous Influence
“Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.” — 2 Peter i. 15.
THE voice is the voice of a veteran, There is none of the silver of youthful music in it. It is round, rich, ripe, mellow: the very tones seem to have upon them the russet of advanced autumn. There is history in this voice. Gone years, with their manifold and affluent experiences, their struggles against Satanic force, and their triumphs through Divine strength, repeat themselves in this rugged and penetrating eloquence. In this respect, then, ours is a high privilege. The young man, in the passion incident to inexperience, says, not without a dash of irreverence and flippancy, that he can soon run up the gamut of an old man’s sober strain. Not so with the veteran before us. Some persons are born old; they are withered, and desiccated, and ungainly from the womb. Others are ever young; winter snows their head, but sends no breath of frost to their warm blood; they go back again to their Creator beautiful in renewed youth, strong in immortal power. Such a man was the writer of this text. His heart throbbed like a hero’s, the fire of inextinguishable enthusiasm in his eye. Bravely, with a conqueror’s port, he says, “I will endeavour.” That word “endeavour” charms and inspires me. It is beautiful in humility; it is majestic in strength. It combines calmness and resolution. It is a child’s word and yet a king’s. The old man is not content with what he has done: valorously he says he will try to do more. There is none of the canting indolence too often incident to old age; there is no moan, no wail, no sigh. Though between him and his death there is only a “shortly” as “the Lord Jesus hath showed” him, yet he says, “I will endeavour — I will contrive — I will put both hands out — nothing shall be wanting on my part — I will work down to the very last moment of my life, that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.”
Such are the circumstances; what is the subject? The subject is post-mortem power, — posthumous influence, — man conquering death, — mind ruling with monarchic majesty when the poor flesh is rotting in a forgotten grave.
1. In calling attention to this multitudinous theme, multitudinous in its principles and applcations, I have to affirm, first of all, that a sublime influence after death is the result of a. sublimely
G conducted life. That statement is surely not wanting in simplicity. The earnest “endeavour” is the cause of the effective “remembrance.” Many covet the influence who are impatient of the long and disciplinary “endeavour.” The two must for ever be united. Can the pauper bequeath large estates to posterity? Can the man whose brain has been permitted to lie like an uncultivated waste, rule the thinking, or mould the course of generations yet to be born? You have no answer but a scornful Vo, and your answer is right: learn, then, that the interpretation of after-death influence is to be found in the range and tone of the alldestining life.
A brief inquiry into the context will show us certain prominent features in the Apostle’s character; and by so much will aid our comprehension of his purpose. What “things,” then, are they which the Apostle is anxious to enshrine in eternal memory? Were they the dreams of a distempered fancy? — the transient experiences of his dying conflict? If you cast your eye over this chapter, you will observe how frequently the Apostle employs the words “these things:” for example, in ver. 8, he says, “For if these things be in you;” in ver. 9, “But he that lacketh these things is blind;” ver. 10, “For if ye do these things, ye shall never fail;’ ver. 12, “I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things;”
and finally in the text, “That ye may have these things always in remembrance.” Of what “things” does the fervent and heroic writer testify? In the beginning of his letter the Apostle intimates that the great end of the redemptive economy is to make us “partakers of the divine nature;” every believer is to have in him all of God that his capacity can contain. God in his intellect, presiding over all the evolutions of his mental life; God in his heart, directing all the issues of his moral being; God in his conduct, sanctifying all his social relations. That is the sovereign object for which, through “divine power,” we are “called to glory and virtue.” The work of sanctification must go on until the saint can say, “I and my Father are one.” That is the sublime end of christianity. It is not to multiply the technicalities of theology; it is not to build one church spire higher than another; it is not to furnish a grindstone on which pugnacious bigots may whet their little swords for internecine combat: it is to gather up a shattered and overthrown humanity — to reburnish the living stones on which the fire of an enemy has left traces of fury — to rebuild the blasted empire of manhood, until it shall be beautiful and holy as a palace built for God.
The Apostle having begun here, proceeds to show that “diligence” is necessary to the full working out of the christian life. He uses a word that cannot easily be forgotten. He says that our simple duty is to ADD! Can we forget that? The ripest scholar amongst us is not beyond that “add:” we are to add the graces one to another until “charity” glitters above them all as a crowning star, “Add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity:” there is no higher height in heaven — it towers into the very heart of God. After this injunction there comes a remark full of significance. I specially call the eye of young men to this ninth verse, “He that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off” This is an interpretation of blindness which is often overlooked. All bad men are blind. The true vision is moral. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see —” “see” what? “See” all great visions in one — “they shall see God.” Call him blind who can see only with his physical eyes. Love knoweth the deepest interpretations. The clear eye of purity can read off the writing on the world’s wall, when the bloodshot eye of the blaspheming bacchanal can see but enough to make his bones shake with avenging agony. Grace is genius. There is a graceless, godless, atheistic thing called genius, but I call it insanity; the light in its eye is not the light of heaven, but the flare of an unholy and unconsecrated “fire. God hath “hidden” certain things from the “wise and prudent,” and “revealed them unto babes;” He has left the “wise” shivering outside the guardian wall, and taken the “babes” with Him to behold the growths of the paradise that never can be lost.
The Apostle, having given this view of the christian life, turns to his personal experience. All old men like to talk about themselves. They are their own library. Their recollections, like the seashells, have in them the boom of the ocean, and in that solemn boom they hear messages from the venerable past. Let the old man talk. His tones fascinate himself at least, and he has the right to the harmless entrancement. Peter says, “I will not be negligent;” “I will stir you up;” “I will endeavour.” His eye brightens, and in his voice there is a quiver of emotion; he sees the heavenly port; he feels that he is breaking up fellowship with this tabernacle; he descries the glory-crowned Beulah; he hears the play of the wave as it breaks on the sinless shore; and then speaks with rapture of “an abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
I have thus reverted to the context because it gives us a revelation of the life which the Apostle had been living, and which he intended to conclude upon earth by an “endeavour” to perpetuate its principles through all time. The Apostle has revealed the root-forces of his being. He has shown us the sources of his vitality, and given to us the secret:of his sovereignty over all-dethroning death. The lesson is clear, that he who would be useful to posterity must be useful to his contemporaries. He who would conquer death and be a minister of God to all coming generations, must live the symmetrical and comprehensive life here sketched by the Apostle’s dying hand. Sublime life and sublime influence are cause and effect. If we are careful about the life, the influence need not excite our anxiety. It is ours to plant, and ours to water, and the increase in this, as in everything else, is with God. Do we not often limit the application of that passage? Do we not lock it up in the church, and confine it to moral service alone? Why, sirs, it is as true in intellectual cultivation as it is in preaching the gospel. It is as true in the farmer’s field as in the preacher’s pulpit. The finite never can do more than plant and water; and all increase — the increase of flower, or forest, or thought, or virtue — is necessarily with the Infinite. Let us do “these things,” and our influence shall be immortal.
History, however, compels us to turn aside, and offer an explanation. When it is affirmed that sublime life and sublime influence are cause and effect, it should be added that the influence is occasionally of tardy growth. Sometimes a man cannot be read by his own age. The prophet lives in the future. He cannot be comprehended by the soothsayers, the magicians, and the monthly prognosticators. Some will say that he is Elias, and others one of the old prophets. All kinds of speculation will be suggested. As in an oil painting, those. who come too near will see nothing but thick flakes of paint. But his day will surely come. The darkness may be long in comprehending the light, but the light will certainly prevail. The wise word may be long in winning a fit audience, but its hope is in the ages, The profound book may remain sealed, but some of the kindred of the Lion of the tribe of Judah will arise and open the volume, and interpret it to a wondering and admiring world. Persevere! Quit you like men! Say again and again, with a hero’s hope, “I will endeavour,” and verily you shall take your sacred place among —
“The dead but sceptred monarchs, who still rule Our spirits from their urns.”
2. The fact that life is the cause of influence, that life is attended with results that are imperishable, greatly enhances the dignity and responsibility of living. “No man liveth unto himself.” A man’s audience, as has just been hinted, may be small to-day, but if he has a living word to utter, his congregation will increase with the ages. Is MILTON dead? Is BunyAN clean gone for ever? Is PAscaL’s memory like a vanished star? Milton never sang to so large an assembly as he sings to to-day. Bunyan is, so to speak, more alive to-day than when he dreamed the world’s happiest dream; he had life then, but he has “life more abundantly” now. The true man does not work for one generation alone. Every true thought is a globe of light, which shall never cease to shine in the world’s brightening firmament. Passing all computation is the reward of the monarch-thinker or the illustrious servant. His compensation is an ever-recurring circle; literally, it never ceases; the cup of water always comes back smiled into wine; God has never done piling crowns upon the head of the faithful.
Still we are to take the element of time into consideration. God does not measure by our chronometers. This is incidentally and beautifully brought out by our Lord in conversation with His brethren, when they wished Him to go up to the feast of tabernacles. They were ambitious, impatient, unbelieving men. A man is often impeded and misunderstood even by his own kinsfolk. So it was with Jesus on the occasion referred to. They urged Him to go into Judea, to get nearer and nearer the great metropolitan centre, and to display His mighty ‘ works on the widest platform. This impatience elicited from Jesus a most profound and instructive reply. It was a reply terribly severe too. He uttered it without fury of tone, but it might have consumed the most brazen cheek. It is wonderful how terrible a thing may be said in a whisper. When those brethren were all pressing Him with petulant importunity to take a bolder position in society, He made this quiet but most blenching reply, “My time is not yet come, but your time is alway ready.” The fungus grows and perishes within the compass of a few hours, but the oak is the growth of centuries. The great truth set forth in Christ’s reply seems to be, that in proportion to the width and volume and weight of character, and in proportion to the pomp and splendour of destiny, is the time required for a man’s full unfoldment and consolidation. The rocket splutters out all its empty secrets at once; the stars have not told all their story yet. We must not measure all men by the same rule. One man comes to his full estate in a single day, as it were; another must do cures to-day and to-morrow, and not until the third day is he perfected.
I have spoken of the reward of the monarch-thinker and illustrious servant; let me add, that what is true in the loftier realms of thought is also true in the humbler spheres of service. The law of the oak is the law of the daisy. All character leaves mere or less of influence behind it. Is that child of yours dead, that years ago, with a bursting heart, you laid under the sod? As long as you carry her fair face in your eye’s picture-book — as long as her charming prattle is memoried in your faithful ear — as long as you thrill under a well-remembered touch of her soft little hand — so long the child is not dead, but sleepeth. Is your companion dead with whom you were wont to take sweet counsel? You hid no secrets from each other. In the newborn light and in the deepening shade you walked together, talked together, exchanged speculations and compared experiences. The one was the complement of the other. And now that you know him no longer after the flesh, is he therefore dead? Verily no. So thoroughly were you one in all your higher instincts and aspirations, that even now you feel as though you could consult him; even now he —
“Comes to your side in the twilight dim,
When the spirit’s eye only sees.”
Even now, with mystic mien and hallowing voice, he takes part in the counsels of your life.
It has just been affirmed that posthumous influence invests life with enhanced dignity. While Bunyan lived he was but as a mustard seed; now he is a great cathedral tree, in which ten thousand voices are lifted up in laudatory and grateful song! “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.” No living man is complete. While your heart throbs you are undergoing a process. Time will mellow you; age will tone your character. Do not urge society to give you a verdict just now. Society is too heated and confused to pronounce upon you with the accuracy of deliberation, and the dignity of repose. Death will befriend you. A most solemn and righteous estimation of character is often introduced by death. The green hillock in the yard of the dead is a Judgment-seat which might well appal an unjust judge. Your appeal then, under all misapprehension and misrepresentation, must be to the new hours which Time has yet to strike from her bell, and which shall chime out many a reversal of condemnation, and many a fulfilment of expectation long deferred. We who believe that the wheel of retribution never pauses, that death does but give us new aspects of life, that there is a higher empire than the flesh, that the absolute and final adjudication is yet to supervene, should carry ourselves with the patience, the calmness, the dignity of men who cannot die! To-day is not the measure of my brief eternity; there is a to-morrow coming, coming from the heart of God, coming from the clime of light, coming with justice in its hand, and mercy on its lip; and to that better day I must commit my cause. The good can afford to be patient. The true can wait until the battering shower is over. The storm can extinguish man’s rushlights, but the orbs of God burn on far beyond the storm’s dark wing.
I. spoke of responsibility as well as dignity, arising from the fact that influence survives our personal presence in society. Opinions have come down to us from the earliest ages, and are to-day ranked among the most influential of national or social forces. Take the one case of the family. The old man quotes what his venerated mother said when he was quite a child, and the mother’s word is to him more powerful than all the statutes of learned parliaments. You have seen a man’s face break into smiles when he called up words which moulded and directed his infancy. The voice that uttered them is employed in other spheres, far off in the higher light that we have come to‘know by the sweet name of heaven; but the thoughts which they embody are comforting angels, that will tarry with us till the dark horizon blushes with the purple of eternal day.
The point to be remembered is this : — our personal absence does not terminate owr influence upon earth. We are setting in motion a train of influences that shall outrun the wheels of the worlds, and be but commencing when those wheels take fire and cease their revolutions for ever. Tremendous is the responsibility of those who have to operate upon unformed and unsettled mind! The writing which you parents write can never be obliterated. Even circumstances to which you attach little or no importance haunt the memory. The frown, ‘the smile, the gentle word, the harsh rebuff, are not to be forgotten! A terrible thing it is to live! Sirs, dyimg is nothing!
Beasts die. Living is everything! On every side the invisible is pressing upon us. The lifting of a hand sends a shudder to the stars! The falling of a tear is heard in the depths of the infinite! We little know how sensitive is the universe. Wherever I put the tip of my finger I touch the hem of the King’s garment. The very stones need but a word from heaven to cause them to stand up as children of Abraham. What, then, shall be said of the moral universe? Experiences, ideas, emotions, run on from age to age, and thus to-day bears the uncounted riches of all expired time. To live once is to live for ever. The feeblest pulse in the obscurest circle flutters and thrills on in its influences when faded worlds expire, and shattered empires go down in death,
3. Every man who is in vital sympathy with Jesus Christ rejoices in the consciousness that he is working for posterity. Here and there, on life’s thronged highway, we have seen little tattered banners set up, bearing this inscription: “I must take care of myself, and posterity may do as well as it can.” This has the semblance of a profoundly wise economy. It is declared to be a fine specimen of the development of individuality. Let fire fall on it! Let the angry earth rend and swallow it up! Let it swiftly fall into the pit! My answer is ready for every man who will stand up and openly declare that his christianity has never led him to make any humble or sublime “endeavour” on behalf of others. If any man will say, after having bowed his knee at Bethlehem, and studied the mystery of the bloody sweltering in Gethsemane, and interpreted the signification of Calvary’s dread work, that his heart is driven in upon itself, without any yearning of affection towards others — even towards the unborn — my answer is at hand: standing before God’s altar, feeling upon me mightily the power of a divine consecration, marking the precious blood which flowed for the world’s guilt, a guilt beyond the world’s comprehending, standing there not as an irate priest, but as an outraged man; in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I excommunicate the wretch!
I claim the world-embracing benevolence of christianity as one of the clearest and strongest defences of its divinity. Its benediction would fall on all human kind. Meet it where you will, its watchword is, “Good news for every man!” ‘The darkness cannot deter it: the storm cannot quench its zeal: devils cannot bind its pinions of light! It will sing everywhere; sing to kings glittering in the spangles of a momentary royalty; sing to the lone wanderer who has no one to fling a smile on his weary way. It knows nothing of our geographical boundaries. Monarchs have gratified themselves by painting the globe-map in divers colours, and driving in stakes to mark the boundaries of their empire; of all this christianity knows nothing — her appeal is to man on every shore, on every mountain, on every plain. All who know it vitally, partake of this all-inclusive benevolence. When they hear the commanding word, “Go ye into all the world,” they feel that less than this would be less than divine!
Will those moral lunatics who are so selfishly devoted to their own immediate interests reflect how much they themselves. were indebted to their forerunners? Do they sufficiently consider that they themselves were not born into an unfurnished house? Who built the temples, fabricated the machinery, patronized the discoveries,, wrote the literature which make up the world’s great bulk? How came we into possession of riches so vast, so golden? Who opened the thousand fountains, whose living waters turn the very desert into a fruitful field? How such things tell of ancestry! how they bind us to the past! how they multiply our obligations! It clearly comes to this, that every man of us is born deeply in debt. Have we paid the poets that have sung to us? Have we paid the mechanicians who have shown us that knowledge is power? Have we paid the mariners who have found out a highway over the billows? Have we paid the authors who have turned our solitude into society? Every one of us is deeply in debt. The
Past is our patient and gracious creditor, and our obligations are overwhelming.
The argument which I wish to build upon the fact is this, — that as we cannot pay the mighty men who have covered the past with immortal renown, and who have laid us deeply in debt to their genius, their piety, their benevolence, we can only show our gratitude by noble “endeavours” to imitate their example. Our thunders of applause are nothing to those whose bodies moulder in the chambers of the dead, and whose spirits worship in the upper light. We may stamp with tremendous approbation upon their graves, but the ear has done with hearing; we may roar our acclaims into the firmament, but heaven opens not to let the unavailing thunder pass. No! let us serve the living, and through them the coming ages. We may all do this. Some can throw open kingdoms of thought, others can carry the prophet’s mantle; some can head the advancing army, others can lift up the wounded and weary. Blessed is that servant who is found waiting! We do not work alone. Down through the roaring and pitiless tempest comes this word of strength, — “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” Into the dark cave into which despair has sometimes driven us comes the same word of power. If we falter for a moment, it is that we may spring forward with increased energy the next. We are not to see the results of all that we do. It is enough that no true word can return void to the speaker. Utter the Lord’s cry to the sons of men; put in the roots; scatter the seed; do all things written in the divine law of human life; and one day the eternal summer shall set in, and all memories shall be absorbed in the one recollection that Jesus Christ tasted death for every man.