Indestructible Possessions

“For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him.” — PSALM xlix. 17.

IT is an old familiar story that David is singing over in his Psalm. He is talking about the worldly man, and the thought of him suggests, as it so often does, the coming close of earthly life. The time is fast approaching when the man of wealth and friends and bright, gay, shining circumstances, is to leave them all. He is to put his hand into the hand of a messenger who comes to summon him, and he is to go out naked into a new life where the things that have most illuminated his life here can have no possibility of existence.” When he dieth, he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him.” The rich man leaves his money. The famous man passes out of the sound of clapping hands. The Sybarite casts one look back on his soft cushions, and then goes down the dark, hard path.

It is one of the oldest of all the thoughts of man, — the separation of a man by death from what he has accumulated in his life. It has had most different effects on different men. Some men it has paralyzed, as if there could be no use in winning what they must so soon lose. Other men it has filled with a feverish eagerness, and made them work with tenfold zeal, as if they must at once get all that they could get out of the things which were so soon to be taken from them. I hope that we can see that there is an influence more noble and more just which the certainty that death must separate us from many of the gains and treasures of our lives ought to have, and may have, upon us all.

And at the very outset we may notice that powerful as this conviction is, much as it weighs upon and influences our lives, it is not, and it evidently was not meant to be, the strongest or the most constant of the powers that influence men’s minds. Another conviction — the conviction that it is good to accumulate the things which make life rich, that the enrichment of life is in itself a worthy desire for a human creature, even in spite of the certainty that it must soon be stripped away, — this conviction always comes in first, and will not let its brightness be blotted out by the shadow of the coming death. Surely there is something impressive and very significant in this.

You go to the merchant, toiling in his shop, piling his dollar on dollar, and before his eyes you lift the curtain that hangs only a few rods off and show him the inevitable future, his pile of money left behind him to be used in ways for which he does not care, ways which perhaps he hates, by people whose whole characters and habits laugh at the way in which his money has been earned, and he looks up for a moment at your picture, shakes his head carelessly at it as if it were the picture of some other man, and then plunges his hands into his gold again and piles dollar upon dollar faster than ever, to make up for lost time. You make the idol of the people enter by anticipation into the silence of the land where the praise of fellow-man shall either never for a moment come, or, if it comes at all, shall only come to show its hollowness; and the flush dies out of his face, he turns pale for a moment, and then the hand is at the ear again that he may not lose one sweet echo of the people’s shouts. The plodder over books, the hoarder of mere facts who never gets at principles, catches one glimpse of the land where principles are to be the only wealth, and, with just a passing tremble of dismay, goes back again to piling up his ant hill. No certainty of the coming abandonment of gains can overcome the passion for acquisition in the soul of man.

Surely this means something. It must mean that the passion for acquisition must be taken into account, must be accepted as a perpetual fact, and somehow made to live in peace and co-operation with the other fact of the necessary separation from their acquisitions which death brings to men. To put these two truths into their true relation to each other, to let neither of them kill the other — this must be our study. For truths, we know, are like the wheels in a machine. They are fitted and toothed to one another. If they are kept with their teeth properly intertwined, they keep each other in motion and help each other work; but if they fall out of their true connection, then they tear each other and disturb and spoil the whole machine. To see how these two facts — the fact of man’s passion for acquisition and the fact of man’s inevitable loss of that which he acquires — fit together and make a strong and healthy human life: this will be our object.

I know I speak to thoughtful men, who are aware of both these facts in their own active lives. You all know and feel in some way the human desire to gain the good things of life; and yet you all know well enough that those good things will hardly be gained before you will have to give them up. Generally the first knowledge is most vivid, and you live in its sunshine. But every now and then the second knowledge sweeps over you like a cloud and hides the sun. Will it not be a gain if the two knowledges can be taught to take each other’s hands and walk together, and lead your life, perpetually aware of both of them, into more peaceful and so more powerful activity?

Perhaps we can reach our subject best if we think not immediately of death, but of some other conceivable event which might be seen approaching, and which, when it arrived, must strip from every man his earnings. Suppose for instance that all men could foresee that, at a certain (or an uncertain) future time, there was coming a great triumph of communism, with a division of all property and the abolishment of private rights. What would be the result of such anticipation? I suppose that there are two principal results, one or the other of which we should see in different men according to their different characters. One class of men would think only of getting all out of the present which they could. ‘’Well, since so soon we are to have nothing,” they would say, “let us make the most of what we can have now. Let us enjoy the present to the full.” Another class would be so wrapt up in the prospect of the coming catastrophe that all chance of enjoying the present would be ruined. “If all is to be stripped away, what is the use of winning anything?” they would ask. These two classes everybody would expect to see, — one of them the class that tries to forget the coming loss in the excess of present joy, the other losing all sense of present ownership in the certainty of coming loss.

But think about it a moment, and see if there is not a third kind of man, who is at least conceivable. In that community which is living under the shadow of the impending communism would there not be here and there a wise and thoughtful man who would be saying to himself: “I cannot live only in the present, and I cannot be apathetic, in despair. I must work. I must accumulate. But what is there which I can accumulate which the communistic tyranny, when it arrives, cannot disturb?” And when he asks that, can you not see how at once there must open to him all the great regions of profounder and truer possessions which no redistribution of property can take away? There are gains won in the business of a true man’s life which would be just as truly his after the mob had passed through the town, and turned him out of his house, and made him share his fortune with the thieves. There is a property so private that no legislation, no revolution, can disturb it.

Suppose that a man demanded of his business that it should furnish him with that. Suppose that, out of all his gaining and spending, he compelled himself to win breadth and loftiness of character, patience, value for the spirits and not the forms of things, a soul superior to the very ministries and machineries by which the superiority of soul was won; and have you not got in that man a real cooperation in their best result of our two truths, — the truth, first, that man must accumulate, and the truth, second, that the things which he accumulates he must part with by and by? Picture the business man thus earning wealth, in distinct view of the certainty that he is going to lose it. He presses each dollar till it yields him moral quality. He stows away into his character patience and perseverance. In earning wealth he learns the limits of what wealth can do, and so a justness and loftiness of soul is bred within him. By and by comes the great crash, and when men look to see him stripped as naked as his most thriftless brethren, behold! the very loss of his property has only made it more evident how thoroughly he is still the possessor of all the moral qualities which came to him in the winning of his property. The whirlwind itself seems to look back at him amazed, for, where it expected to see him lying a ruin upon the ground, there he stands, stripped of his leaves indeed, but all the more evidently alive with a life, rich with a riches, which it is in no power to destroy.

Now, try to carry all that over and apply it to men’s anticipation of death. Death is the great communism. It levels all our human greatnesses. Here they are, beggar and prince to-day, one strut ting over velvet, the other grovelling in the mire; to-morrow both together ashes to ashes, dust to dust. On this side of the grave are scholar and dunce, one crowned with all the honors of the schools, the other wearing life out in a drudgery only better than the brutes; on the other side, both alike in the common ignorance of forgetfulness. How natural, how familiar all that sounds! We have heard it all our lives; and oh, how superficial it all is! How it ignores everything except the most manifest and material of human acquisitions!

Thank God, the inequalities of wealth are not to go beyond the grave! Thank God, the rich man’s insolence and the poor man’s servility alike are to be known no longer in the New Jerusalem! But the rich man’s self-control and the poor man’s self-respect — a self-control plucked out of the very heart of luxury, a self-respect gathered out of the very mire of men’s contempt — what has the grave to say to them? The scholar’s love for truth, the unselfishness which the servant of the people has learned in his long years of applauded or unapplauded public life, — when these shine out all the more brightly in the Everlasting Life, just because the special subject of the scholar’s study has been left behind among the outgrown interests of earth, and the temporary interests which engaged the powers of the public man have been drowned in the crossing of the river, — shall it not then be clear enough how the truth of necessary acquisition, and the truth of the necessary loss of the acquired thing, have worked together?

And this is the result — a deeper acquisition, an acquisition of character. When a man has made his life render that to him, then he has got down into a deeper region, or up into a higher one, where the words which David spoke, in the ordinary middle region of human experience and thought, are no longer true. He has come into that higher world where death has lost his victory. The man does carry something away with him when he dieth. The true glory of his life does follow him. What was true below is no longer true when the man has risen to the larger conception and larger use of life.

I think I know the difficulty which will suggest itself in view of thoughts like these. It will seem as if the perpetual treatment of present life with reference to the life which is to come would give a sort of unreality to living which would destroy all its pleasure, and defeat at once its higher and its lower purposes. It would seem to threaten us with that 44 other- worldliness,” as it has been called, — that loss of the best uses of this world in the morbid expectation of the next, which has been often alleged by unchristian people to be the natural tendency of Christianity.

But here comes in a truth of experience, which has always seemed to me to be one of the most beautiful and suggestive indications of the care that God has for the good growth of His children. I think that all experience bears witness that the healthy and sincere use of any of God’s blessings which are in their nature temporary and partial, has a- tendency to prepare the man who uses them for higher fields of life in which he shall have outgone them and left them behind. The hearty enjoyment of a bright clear day makes a man not less, but more, ready for those exacting duties in which the sensibilities are too weak to support us, and the conscience must be summoned to its bravest work. The grateful and loving acceptance of pleasure as the gift of God is all the time, unconsciously, with out the happy mortars thinking of it, stocking his life with the faith which he will need when he has to leave the happiness behind and go forth into some dark sorrow. The soul which God allows to bask in friendships gathers in them the qualities which, when the friendships are stripped off from it, it carries with it into the unfriended and solitary years which lie beyond. A true and simple childhood ceases, but the grown-up man wonders to find that it has left in him an unexpected faith and strength for the emergencies of manhood. Every where we see some glimpses of this gracious law — that he who lives nobly and simply and devoutly in any condition which is by its very nature temporary, accumulates unconsciously in it the outfit which he is going to need for the higher and more exacting life into which he is by and by called to pass.

Now, if this same law can apply between the worlds, do you not see what its results will be? Just as you live in the pure pleasure of a glorious day, gratefully and simply taking its joys and duties at the hand of God, and never thinking about to morrow, but when to-morrow comes, lo, here in you is the health which you never sought, but which you all the time were winning on that glorious yesterday; — so let the mortal live here in the most pure and healthy enjoyment of this glorious world, let him take every duty, let him take every joy in the most simple loyalty and love, not thinking of a world to come, thinking only of this world and of how full it is of God, and of how good it is to live, and to work, and to touch these lives of our brethren with the delightful contacts of our different relationships all met and filled out with the most faithful faithfulness that we can render; let a man live so, and then some morning let the gates of immortality fly open, and the freed soul pass through into the larger life; and then how glorious does the working of the law be come. The public servant, the business man, the student, the mechanic — how completely he has left his desk, his shop, his books, his tools behind! But, as he stands on the other side, for a moment almost at a loss for them, how the chorus of qualities which has been trained within him by his long service lifts up its voice and greets him: “Lo, we are with you still! Lo, we have crossed the river with you and still are with you! We, too, are breathing this celestial air, and we, like you, are finding ourselves filled to our noblest and completest being by it. We shall be ready, we who were with you on the earth, — patience and courage, and hope and truth and humbleness, — we shall be ready here for all the larger work that you will need us for.”

Can you imagine that? and then can you imagine that man, entered on his immortality, with all his company of earth-trained helpers, looking back to earth and seeing those whom he has left behind still in the midst of this intense, delightful life, with the river still uncrossed? Can you not hear what his voice would say to them? “Be pure and faithful,” — so the dead would speak to the living; “love God and do your duty. Enjoy life purely and faithfully. Do not think of Eternity in any way which shall make Time less full of eagerness and delight. Be pure and faithful, and when you come to the river all that you need to have go over will go over in you. And you will never miss what cannot cross with you, but must be left behind because its day is over.”

It is not hard, I am sure, to imagine that, as a liberated human spirit spoke those words to the spirits which were still upon the earth, still in the body, he would be conscious of a double joy: first, of a joy to know that what he really needed in eternity of all that he had gained on earth — his qualities and character — were with him still; but also, secondly, another joy at his release even from those things in many of which, while he was still in mortal life, he found much of the joy of living.

Oh, my dear friends, are there not times when all of us have realized that there is another tone in which those words of David about the dying man — “He carrieth nothing away with him when he dieth,” meaning, as David certainly did mean, the mere conditions and machineries of life, — that there is another tone in which those words of David may be said, a tone of triumph and congratulation? How many there are, even of things which we have deeply loved and earnestly enjoyed of which we feel that this life has given us enough, and that we do not want to see them any more upon the other side! How many of the complicated ways of business and society, much as our hearts are bound up in them now, we are rejoiced to know will disappear in the simplicity of heaven! How often, when we are in the midst of the elaborate conventionalities of social life, or planning and planning how to make and spend our money, or pondering upon the complex workings of government, or sitting on a charity committee, or attending a general convention, the words come to us like a great wave of comfort: “When you die, you shall carry nothing of all this away with you “! To get the kernel some day safely out of the shell and throw the shell away — who does not sometimes long for that? And when it comes, who does not dare to believe that, however happy the shell may have made him in its growing, it will be easy enough to let it go when, in its going, the kernel which has grown within it comes forth in its preciousness and glory?

Have we not then come to some meeting of these two truths — man’s ineradicable love of acquisition, and the certainty that much of what he acquires must be speedily abandoned? Here is this other truth — that in every legitimate acquisition of man, if it be won in the loftiest and truest way, there is something that comes into the man himself, which is utterly beyond the power of death to destroy, and must go wherever the man goes, and shall last while he shall last. Out of the king’s reigning something comes into the king, out of the beggar’s begging something comes into the beggar; and that shall be somewhere, wherever king or beggar is, long after the king’s throne has its new tyrant and another beggar crouches in the dust where this forgotten one used to crawl.

And the issue of this fuller truth in practical conduct, as I have tried to show, will be that the truest life must be that which most healthily enjoys and most faithfully uses the earth and its conditions. In it the completest preparation is being made for the great inevitable change. Surely no man ever more faithfully lived this earthly life than Jesus Christ did, and yet none was ever readier to lay it away and go to the Father. In Him the two principles worked in perfect harmony. And all the noblest and completest natures have been marked by the union and harmony of these two facts; first, that they most intensely enjoyed and worked in life; and, second, that they were readiest, when the time came, to change this life for what we call “the other.”

The relation between man and life — that is what we have been studying. How low and base and degrading that relation may be made, we know full well. We have seen it all our lives. We can see it any day. Men who, when they first touched life, seemed to be all fresh and pure, by and by see how they are walking as if they had waded through mire, all smirched and stained and blackened with the wickedness which they have attracted out of life. Man and Life — how we come to feel that one means the power of being tempted and soiled, and the other means the great reservoir of temptation and pollution out of which no human being can fail to gather degradation as his time goes on. But there come moments when we are able to take larger views, moments when we are able to look back to the first ideas of Man and Life as they existed in the mind of God at the beginning, and to look forward to the Restoration or the Redemption of those ideas by Christ.

Their Redemption by Christ! Do we know fully what that means? It means the reclaiming of the world, or of a man, for the completest being of which he is capable, by the power of Him who manifested the Love of God in all the sincerity and persuasion of His deadly suffering upon the earth. You belonged to God. You were by your first idea His servant and His child. Christ came to claim you for the God to whom you belonged, to make you know, to force and crowd it home upon you so that you could not help knowing, that you were His child; and then to turn this whole world into a great nursery for His child’s education.

If that could be completely done, if you and the world about you could be so redeemed, then, is it not evident that all this which I have been trying to describe must come to pass? The very type of a being living in the present, using it enthusiastically and never making any plans beyond it, but yet gathering out of it the very best sort of preparation for the unopened future, is found in the happy and obedient child, living loyally in his father’s house, and gathering every day into his nature unconscious preparation for the years to come. What does the boy of fourteen know about the anxieties and cares of forty? When does he stop to think whether he will be ready for the cares and anxieties of forty, when it comes? And yet when, by and by, he crosses that critical line which seems to carry him into another world, it is what he has gathered unconsciously in his father’s house that he carries with him to be his equipment in the untried years.

Now, the Redemption of Christ makes men, as I have said, know that they are, and so makes them practically to be, God’s children. It transforms the world into God’s house. What it does, then, for us, is to make us repeat in our life this experience of childhood. For us, too, living in Christ’s Redemption, each present, thankfully accepted and conscientiously used, becomes the preparation for greater things to come. Out from each period, into the period which waits beyond, we carry the personal qualities which have been born in us as we lay upon the bosom of His Fatherhood. And at the last, when we die, the leaving of all earthly circumstances behind only makes more absolutely clear to us that the new world to which we go is part of the same

Father’s house; and that we who go there carry our perpetual childhood to the same Father to whom Christ has redeemed and reconciled us here.

This ought to come with great assurance and comfort to those of you who have watched the dying of your friends. Some busy man, right by your side, in the full current of activity, has seen the inevitable summons and dropped the tools of life and gone away. The day after he is buried, you walk through his empty house. There is all that used to identify him to you. The shelves are crowded with the books he loved. The furniture is full of memories of him. Signs of his wealth and tokens of his taste are everywhere. The clothes he wore still keep his shape. The instruments with which he worked have hardly yet grown cold. Some friend beside you says: “Poor fellow, it was very hard to leave all this! How he worked for it all! How he enjoyed it all! And now he has left it all behind! David was right; when he died, he did, indeed, carry nothing away.”

But then, if you have got hold of our truth, does not your heart perhaps remonstrate: Nay, for this man David was not right; David was wrong! Did he really carry nothing away, — he who went into the mysterious world beyond, rich in wisdom, pa tience, and trust, with purity that had been tried and whitened in the fire, with a judgment enlarged and a soul ripened by countless struggles? Has he carried nothing, — he who goes wrought and kneaded through and through with the certainty that he is God’s child, which he has gained out of a thousand quiet communions with his Father, and a hundred terrible emergencies when he has had to cling to his Father’s Fatherhood with desperate hands? Does he carry nothing — he who carries the new self which was born in the new birth?

There are times when the old chant changes; when, not that man leaves everything behind him, but that man takes everything with him, becomes the certainty that fills our souls as we hear the step of Death coming to call us or to call our brethren away.

How terrible that certainty is! How glorious that certainty is! How it makes any patient and conscientious work, as one tries to do it here in Christ’s name, shine with all the radiance of eternity! “Work on,” one wants to cry to all true workers, “work on with all your might. No matter whether you seem to succeed or seem to fail, no matter whether men give you praise or blame. You are gathering character. You are becoming more and more a child of God. And when the call comes, though the work must all be left, the worker will go on and up, carrying with him all that the grace and goodness of God has made him be.”

May the hope of that day, and of all that lies beyond it, strengthen our hearts and hands when they grow weak!