The Shortness of Life

“Brethren, the time is short.” — 1 COR. yii. 29.

THE tone in which a man speaks often helps us to understand his meaning quite as much as the actual words he says. And with a great and sincere writer there is a tone in writing as well as in speaking, some thing which gives an intonation to the words he writes, and lets us understand in which of several possible spirits he has written them. “Brethren, the time is short,” writes St. Paul to the Corinthians, and there is no tremor of dismay or sadness in his voice. He was in the midst of work, full of the interest and joy of living, holding the reins of many complicated labors in his hands, and he quietly said, “This is not going to last long. Very soon it will be over.” It is what men often say to themselves with terror, clutching the things which they hold all the more closely, as if they would hold on to them forever. There is nothing of that about St. Paul. And on the other hand, there is nothing of morbidness or discontent, no rejoicing that the time is short, and wishing that it was still shorter. There is no hatred of life which makes him want to be away. There is no mad impatience for the things which lie beyond. There is simply a calm and satisfied recognition of a fact. There is a reasonable sense of what is good and dear in life, and yet, at the same time, of what must lie beyond life, of what life cannot give us. It is as when the same pen wrote those sublime and simple words, “This corruptible must put on in corruption. This mortal must put on immortality;” the quiet statement of a great, eternal necessity, at which the wise man must feel the same kind of serious joy as that with which he follows the movements of the stars, and looks to see day and night inevitably give place to one another. Or it is like that calm, majestic weighing of two worlds over against each other, and letting his will lie in even balance between them, cordially waiting the will of God, with which the same Paul wrote again, “I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better: nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you: and having this confidence, I know that I shall abide.” Or, again, it is like the healthy satisfaction of the healthy boy in his boyhood, knowing all the time the manhood that awaits him, feeling his boyhood pressed upon by it, hoping for it and expecting it, but living now in the concentrated happiness and work of the years whose activity and pleasure is all the more intense be cause of the sense that it must end.

It does not matter what St. Paul was thinking of when he said the time was short. He may have had his mind upon the death which they were all approaching. He may have thought of the coming of Christ, which he seems to have expected to take place while he was yet alive. I do not think we can be certain which it was. And perhaps the very vagueness about this helps us to his meaning. For he is not, evidently, dwelling upon the nature of the event which is to limit the “time,” only upon the simple fact that there is a limit; that the period of earthly life and work lies like an island in the midst of a greater sea of being, the island of time in the ocean of a timeless eternity; and that it is pressed upon and crowded into littleness by the infinite. Not the shore where the sea sets the island its limits, but only the island in the sea, hearing the sea always on its shores; not the experience by which this life should pass into an other, but only the compression and intensifying of this life by the certainty that there is another; not death, but the shortness of life — that is what his thoughts are fixed upon, and it is this of which the best men always think the most.

Our theme is this, then — the shortness of human life. How old that theme is, how trite, and oftentimes how dreary. As we look back and listen we hear all the genarations wearisomely wasting their little span of life in doleful lamentations that it is not longer. Trite lessons which nobody loves to learn; dull poems which no man can sing; efforts at resignation which do not succeed, — these are what come flocking up about the truth that life is short. It is the ghost at the banquet of human thought. It is the monotonous, miserable undertone that haunts all the bustle and clatter of men’s work and all the gay music of their pleasure-making. I wish that I could read its truth to you in another tone and paint its picture in another color. I wish that I could make you hear it, as it seems as if Paul’s Corinthians must have heard it, almost like a trumpet, — a call to work and joy. If we can catch his spirit at all, something of that may certainly be possible.

And first, then, let us ask, What is the shortness of life? What do we mean by life’s being short? There is a little insect that crawls upon the trees, and creeps, in one short day of ours, through all the experiences of life from birth to death. In a short twenty-four hours his life begins, matures, and ends, — birth, youth, activity, age, decrepitude, all crowded and compressed into these moments that slip away uncounted in one day of our human life. Is his life long or short? Is our life long or short to him? If he could realize it by any struggle of his insect brain, what an eternity our threescore years and ten must seem to him! And then lift up your eyes, lift up your thoughts, and think of God. What look has any life that has any limits to Him? Nothing short of eternity can seem long to Him. He sees the infant’s life flash like a ripple into the sunlight of existence and vanish almost before the eye has caught it. And He sees Methuselah’s slow existence creep through its nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and find, at last, the grave which had stood waiting so long* Is there a real difference in the length of these two lives to Him? A little longer ripple is the life of the patriarch than was the life of the baby, that is all. And what do we mean then by the shortness of our human life? To the ephemera it looks like an eternity; to God it looks like an instant. Evidently these attributes of length and shortness must be relative; they are not abeolute. How shall human life seem then to man? Must it not depend altogether upon where he stands to look at it? If he stands with the ephemera, his life looks long to him. If he stands with God, his life looks short to him. If a man 13 able, that is, to conceive of immortality; if he can picture to himself a being who can live forever if he recognizes in himself any powers which can outlast and laugh at death, — then any limit of life must seem narrow; against the broad background of the whole, any part must seem small. On the blue sky the almost million miles of the sun’s breadth seem narrow. It is here that the truth about the matter lies. It is only by the dim sense of his immortality, only by the divine sight of himself as a being capable of long, long life, that man thinks his life on earth is short. Only by losing that divine sight of himself, and looking at himself as the beasts look at themselves, can he come to think his life long. The beast’s life never seems short to him. Think of youi’self as a beast and your life will never seem short to you. It is the divine consciousness in man, the consciousness that he is a child of God, that makes him know he is short-lived. Human life is not long or short, absolutely. It seems short to us because the consciousness of immortality is in us. What then? It could not seem long unless we threw that consciousness away. That we can count it short, then, is the pledge and witness of our nobility. The man who died among us yesterday, oh, realize, my friends, that the very fact that his life could seem to you, as you stood by his coffin, to have been very short, is a sign that you have been able to conceive of his humanity and yours being immortal. Feel this, and is not the shortness of life the crown and glory of our race?

And again, we all know how the shortness of life is bound up with its fullness. It is to him who is most active, always thinking, feeling, working, caring for people and for things, that life seems short. Strip a life empty and it will seem long enough. The day crawls to the idler, and flies to the busy worker. That is the common place of living. The shortness of life is closely associated, not merely with the great hopes of the future, but with the real vitality of the present. What then? If you and I complain how short life is, how quick it flies through the grasp with which we try to hold it, we are complaining of that which is the necessary consequence of our vitality. You can make life long only by making it slow; and if you want to make it slow I should think that there were men enough in town who could tell you how; men with idle hands and brains, who seem to have so much trouble to get through life as it is that we can not imagine that they really wish that there were more of it.

And tell me, then, does not the shortness of life cease to be our sorrow and lamentation; does it not become our crown and privilege and glory, when we see that life is short to us because we are, that life is short to us just in proportion as we are, conscious of immortality and full of vitality? Who would not dread to have his life begin to seem long? Who would not feel that he was losing the proof-marks of his best humanity, forgetting that he was immortal and ceasing to be thoroughly alive?

But let us leave this and go further on. Suppose a man, with more or less of struggle, with what grace he can, has accepted the shortness of life as a conviction. He knows it. It has been forced upon him by some special shock, or it has been pressed into him by his gradual ex perience, the certainty that life is short, that he is not to be, cannot be, a long time here on the earth. What effect will that conviction have upon his life? What effect ought it to have? Evidently it ought to go deeper than his spirits. It ought to do something more than make him glad or sorry. It ought to have some effect upon his conduct and his character. I should like to suggest to you in several particulars what it seems to me that that effect will be.

1. And first of all must it not make a man try to sift the things that offer themselves to him, and try to fic. out what his things are? The indiscriminateness of most men’s lives impresses us, 1 think, more and more. The old Greek Epictetus said that for each of men there is one great classification of the universe, into the things which concern him and the things which do not concern him. To how many men that classification is all vague. Many men’s souls are like omnibuses, stopping to take up every interest or task that holds up its finger and beckons them from the sidewalk. So many men are satisfied with asking themselves vague questions about whether this thing or that thing is wrong, as if whatever they could not pronounce to be absolutely wrong for every man to do was right for them to do. So many men seem to think it enough that they should see no good reason for not doing a thing, in order to justify their doing it. As if the absence of any reason why they should do it were not reason enough why they should not do it. Such indiscriminateness would be inevitable, you could not hope to control it, if life were indefinitely long. Such indiscriminateness is almost legitimate and necessary in childhood, in the beginning, the freshman year of life. Then life seems endless. Then the quick experimenting senses are ready for whatever strikes them. But as the course goes on, as its limit comes in sight and we see how short it is, the elective system must come in. Out of the mass of things which we have touched, we must choose these which are ours, — the books which we shall read, the men whom we shall know, the power that we shall wield, the pleasure which we shall enjoy, the special point where we shall drop our bit of usefulness into the world’s life before we go. We come to be like a party of travellers left at a great city railway station for a couple of hours. All cannot see everything in town. Each has to choose according to his tastes what he will see. They separate into their individualities instead of going wandering about promiscuously, as they would if there were no limit to their time. So conscientiousness, self-knowledge, independence, and the toleration of other men’s freedom which always goes with the most serious and deep assertion of our own freedom are closely connected with the sense that life is very short.

2. But again, besides this discrimination of the things with which we ought to deal, the sense of the shortness of life also brings a power of freedom in dealing with the things which we do take to be our own. This, I think, is what St. Paul is speaking of in the words which are in close connection with this text of ours. “Brethren, the time is short,” he says; “it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep as though they wept not; and they that rejoice as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy as though they possessed not; and they that use this world as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away.” Not that they should not marry, or weep, or rejoice, or buy, or use the world. The shortness of life was not to paralyze life like that. But they were to do these things as if they did them not. They were to do them with a soul above their details, and in the principles, reasons, and motives which lay beyond them. To take once more the illustration of the travellers: he who has only an hour to stay in some great foreign city will not puzzle and burden himself with all the intricacies of its streets or all the small particulars of its life. He will try, if he is wise, simply to catch its general spirit, to see what sort of town it is and learn its lessons. He must tread its pavements, ride in its carriages, talk with its people; but he will not do these things as the citizens do them; he will not be fastidious about them; he will hold them very loosely, only trying to make each of them give him what help it can towards the understanding of the city. He will do them as if he did them not. Is not that the idea? Just so he who knows he is in the world for a very little while, who knows it and feels it, is not like a man who is to live here forever. He strikes for the centre of living. He cares for the principles and not for the forms of life. He does the little daily things of life, but he does them for their purposes, not for themselves. He is like a climber on a rocky pathway, who sets his foot upon each projecting point of stone, but who treads on each, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the ones above it. The man who knows he is to die to-morrow does all the acts of to-day, but does them as if he did not do them, does them freely, cannot be a slave to their details, has entered already into something of the large liberty of death. That is the way in which the sense that life is short liberates a man from the slavery of details. You say, perhaps, “That is not good. No man can do his work well unless his heart is in it.” But is it not &lso true that a man’s heart can really be only in the heart of his work, and that the most conscientious faithfulness in details will always belong to the man, not who serves the details, but who serves the idea of the work which he has to do? He who holds that the “fashion of this world passeth away” will live in the fashion still as a present means of working, but will get a great deal more out of it, because he holds it a great deal more loosely than the man who treats it as if it were to last forever. Through the freer use of the fashion which passeth away he will come to the substance which cannot pass away, — the love of God, the life and character of man.

3. Closely connected with this is another idea, which is that in the shortness of life the great emotions and experiences by which the human character is ruled and shaped assume their largest power and act with their most ennobling influence. Every emotion which a man can feel, every experience which a man can undergo, has its little form and its great form. Happiness is either a satisfaction that the cushions are soft and the skies clear, or a sublime content in harmony with the good universe of God. Love is either a whim of the eyes, or a devotion and consecration of the soul. Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God’s children. Hope is either a petty wilfulness, or a deep and thought ful insight. Trust is either laziness or love. Fear is either a fright of the nerves, or the solemn sense of the continuousness and necessary responsibility of life. And grief is either the wrench of a broken habit, or the agony of a wrung soul. So every emotion has its higher and its lower forms. It means but little to me if I know only that a man is happy or unhappy, if I do not know of what sort his joy or sorrow is. But all the emotions are certainly tempted to larger action if it is realized that the world in which they take their birth is but for a little time, that its fashion passes away, that the circumstances of an experience are very transitory. That must drive me down into the essence of every experience and make me realize it in the profoundest and the largest way. Take, for instance., one experience. Think of deep sorrow coining to a man, something which breaks his home and heart by taking suddenly, or slowly, out of them that which is the centre. of them both, some life around which all his life has lived. There are two forms in which the sorrow of that death comes to a man. One is in the change of circumstances, the breaking up of sweet companionships and pleasant habits, the loneliness and weariness of living; the other is in the solemn brooding of mystery over the soul and the tumult of love within the soul, the mystery of death, the distress of love. Now if the man who is bereaved sees nothing in the distance, as he looks forward, but one stretch of living, if he realizes most how long life is, it is the first of these aspects of his sorrow that is the most real to him. He multiplies the circumstances of his bereavement into all these coming years. Year after year, year after year, he is to live alone. But if, as it so often happens when death comes very near to us, life seems a very little thing; if, when we stand to watch the spirit which has gone away from earth to heaven, the years of earth which we have yet to live seem very few and short; if it seems but a’ very little time before we shall go, too, then our grief ia exalted to its largest form. It grows unselfish. It is perfectly consistent with a triumphant thankfulness for the dear soul that has entered into rest and glory. It dwells not on the circumstances of bereavement, but upon that mysterious strain in which love has been stretched from this world to the other, and, amid all the pain that the tension brings, is still aware of joy at the new knowledge of its own capacities which has been given it. Ah, you must all know, you must all have seen, that men’s griefs are as different as men’s lives are. To the man who is all wrapt up in this world, grief comes as the ghosts come to the poor narrow-minded churl, — to plague and tease him, to disturb the circumstances and habits of his living, to pull down his fences and make strange, frightful noises in his quiet rooms. All is petty. To him to whom life is but an episode, a short stage in the existence of eternity, who is always cognizant of

the great surrounding world of mystery, grief comes as angels came to the tent of Abraham. Laughter is hushed before them. The mere frolic of life stands still, but the soul takes the grief in as a guest, meets it at the door, kisses its hand, washes its travel-stained feet, spreads its table with the best food, gives it the seat by the fireside, and listens reverently for what it has to say about the God from whom it came. So different are the sorrows that come to two men which seem just the same. So is every emotion great or little, according to the life in which it finds its play. It must find earth too small for it, and open eternity to itself, or it spreads itself out thin and grows petty. I beg you, if God sends you grief, to take it largely by letting it first of all show you how short life is, and then prophesy eternity. Such is the grief of which the poet sings so nobly, —” Grief should be

Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate;
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free;
Strong to consume small troubles; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.”

But grief, to be all that, must see the end; must bring and forever keep with its pain such a sense of the shortness of life that the pain shall seem but a temporary accident, and that all that is to stay forever after the pain has ceased, the exaltation, the unselfishness, the mystery, the nearness to God, shall seem to be the substance of the sorrow.

4. But let me hasten on and name another power which seems to be bound up with the perception of the shortness of life. I mean the criticalness of life. All men who have believed at all that there was another life, have held in some way that this life was critical. Some have held absolutely that probation wholly stopped when this life ended, and that as the man was when he died, so he was certainly to be forever and ever. Others have only felt that such a change as death involves must have some mighty power to fasten character, and so to fasten destiny, and that the soul, living in any unknown world, must carry forever, deep in its nature and its fortunes, the marks and consequences of what it has been here. That thought of criticalness belongs to every limited period of being which opens into something greater. A boy feels the probation character of his youth, feels that he is making manhood, just in proportion as he vividly realizes the approach of his majority. And man is made BO that some sense of criticalness is necessary to the most vigorous and best life always. Let me feel that nothing but this moment depends upon this moment’s action, and

I am very apt to let this moment act pretty much as it will. Let me see the spirits of the moments yet unborn standing and watching it anxiously, and I must watch it also for their sakes. And it is in this general sense of probation, or of criticalness, this sense that no moment liveth or dieth to itself; it is in this, not stated as a doc trine, but spread out as a great pervading consciousness all through life, it is in this that the strongest moral power of life is found. Now ask yourself: Could this have been if life had been so long, if life had seemed so long to men, as never to suggest its limits? It is when the brook begins to hear the great river calling it, and knows that its time is short, that it begins to hurry over the rocks and toss its foam into the air and make straight for the valley. Life that never thinks of its end lives in a present and loses the flow and movement of responsibility. It is not so much that the shortness of life makes us prepare for death, as it is that it spreads the feeling of criticalness all through life, and makes each moment prepare for the next, makes life prepare for life. This is its power. Blessed is he who feels it. Blessed is he in whose experience each day and each hour has all the happiness and all the solemnity of a parent towards the day and the hour to which it gives birth, stands sponsor for it, holds it for baptism at the font of God. Such days are sacred in each other’s eyes. The life in which such days succeed each other is a holy family with its moments “bound each to each by natural piety.”

5. I take one moment only to suggest one more consequence which comes from the sense of how short life is. I mean the feeling that it gives us towards our fellow-men. Do you not know that when your time of intercourse is short with any man, your relations with that man grow true and deep? Two men who have lived side by side for years, with business and social life between them, with a multitude of suspicions and concealments, let them know that they have only an hour more to live together, and, as they look into each other’s eyes, do not the suspicions and concealments clear away? They know each other. They trust each other. They think the best of each other. They are ready to do all that they can do for each other in those few moments that remain. Oh, my dear friends, you who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them; you who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead to morrow morning; you who are letting your neighbor starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend’s heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give him some day, — if you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that “the time is short,” how it would break the spell! How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do. What a day of friendliness, of brotherliness, of reconciliations, of help, the last day of the world will be, if men shall know how near the awful end is! But need we wait for that? Cannot the men and women whom we live with now be sacred to us by the knowledge of what wonderful, mysterious ground it is that we are walking together, here in this narrow human life, close on the borders of eternity?

“Brethren, the time is short.” There is the fact, then, forever pressing on us, and these are the consequences which it ought to bring to those who feel its pressure. Behold, it is no dreary shadow hanging above our heads and shutting out the sunshine. It is an everlasting inspiration. It makes a man know himself and his career. It makes him put his heart into the heart of the career which he knows to be his. It makes the emotions and experiences of life great and not petty to him. It makes life solemn and interesting with criticalness; and it makes friendship magnanimous, and the desire to help our fellow-men real and energetic. It concentrates and invigorates our lives. In the brightest, freshest, clearest mornings, it comes to us not as a cloud, not as a paralysis, but as a new brightness in the sunshine and a new vigor in the arm. “Brethren, the time is short.” Only remember the shortness of life is not a reality to us, except as it shows itself against a true realization of eternity. Life is long to any man, however he mourns over •ts shortness, to whom life is a whole. Life as a part, life set upon the background of eternity, life recognized as the temporary form of that whose substance is everlasting, that is short; we wait for, we expect its end. And remember that to the Christian the interpretation of all this is in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore.” The earthly life set against the eternal life, the incorporate earthly form uttering here for a time the everlasting and essential being, those years shut in out of the eternities between the birth and the ascension, that resurrection opening the prospect of the life that never was to end, — these are the never-failing interpretation to the man who believes in them of the temporal and eternal in his own experience. Christ comes and puts His essential life into our human form. In that form He claims the truest brotherhood with us. He shares our lot. He binds His life with ours so that they never can be separated. What He is we must be; what we are He must be forever. Finally, by the cross of love, He, entering into our death, takes us completely into His life. And when He had done all this He rose. Out of His tomb, standing there among human tombs, He comes, and lo, before Him there rolls on the unbroken endlessness of Being. And not before Him alone, — before those also whom He had taken so completely to Himself. His resurrection makes our resurrection sure. Our earthly life, like His, becomes an episode, a short, special, temporary thing, when it is seen like His against an immortality.

So the Incarnation is the perpetual interpretation of our life. Jesus cries, “It is finished,” on His cross, and at once it is evident that that finishing is but a beginning; that it is a breaking to pieces of the temporal, that it may be lost in the eternal! That cross is the perpetual glorification of the shortness of life. In its light we, too, can stand by the departing form of our own life, or of some brother’s life, and say, “It is finished,” and know that the finishing is really a beginning. The temporary is melting away like a cloud in the sky, that the great total sky may all be seen. The form in which the man has lived is decaying, that the real life of the man may be apparent. The fashion of this’world is passing away; the episode, the accident of earth is over, that the spiritual reality may be clear. It is in the light of the cross that the exquisite picture of Shelley, who tried so hard to be heathen and would still be Christian in his own despite, is really realized, —

“The one remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines; earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments.”

And so what is there to be done? What could be clearer? Only to him who realizes eternity does the short human life really seem short and give out of its shortness its true solemnity and blessing. It is only by binding myself to eternity that I can know the shortness of time. But how shall I bind myself to eternity except by giving myself to Him who is eternal in obedient love? Obedient love! Loving obedience! That is what binds the soul of the less to the soul of the greater everywhere. I give myself to the eternal Christ, and in His eternity I find my own. In His service I am bound to Him, and the shortness of that life, whose limitations in any way shut me out from Him, becomes an inspiration, not a burden to me. Oh, my dear friends, you who with Christian faith have seen a Christian die, tell me was not this short life then revealed to you in all its beauty? Did you not see completely that no life was too long which Christ had filled with the gift and knowledge of Himself; no life was too short which departed from the earth only to go and be with Him in Heaven forever?

My dear friends, let us think how solemn, how beautiful, the thought of dedication to Christ becomes, when through His voice which calls us sounds the warning and inspiring cry of His disciple, “Brethren, the time is short.” There is no time to waste of what belongs entirely to Him, “The time is short.” Take your place now. Bind yourself now in with the fortunes of those who are trying to serve Him. This Christian Church which we see here is only the beginning. This poor, stained, feeble church of earth is only the germ and promise of the great Church of Heaven, and we who are trying to serve Him together now have a right to take courage from the promise of the Master, who has overcome, “Him that overcometh I will make a pillar in the temple of my God, and He shall go no more out.”