Everything Beautiful in His Time

11 He hath made everything beautiful in his time.”

ECCLESIASTES ill. 11.

FITNESS or timeliness is one strong element in every idea of beauty. A place for everything and everything in its place, a time for everything and everything in its time, these are the principles that lie at the bottom of that enjoyment of things which we call a sense of beauty. There is nothing which has such absolute self-contained loveliness that we can say of it that it would be lovely every where and always. Put it into certain surroundings, throw certain lights upon it and it would seem ugly. The writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes reverses this truth, gives us the other side of it. He says that there is nothing so essentially unbeautiful that, put into its true place and time, it would not become beautiful. The disorder of the universe, the things that shock us and distress us and disgust us in it, come not from the essential badness of the material of the universe, but from its dislocations.

It is in the disarrangement of what needs arrangement. It is the stoppage of the machine by some part of its own machinery which has wrenched itself out of position and got between the wheels. It is the spoiling of the picture by the casting of the strong color here which was needed there. These are what make the mischief in the world and what destroy its beauty. Our own instincts of beauty recognize the law. They demand harmony and timeliness and fitness. They are not chained to any conventional standards. They are willing to see things in new arrangements, provided they are recognized when they are seen as natural and fit arrangements. But the shock and startle which comes from the sight of unnatural arrangements, from seeing things out of place, this the pure taste discriminates at once, and knows that what creates it is not beautiful but grotesque, and that the pleasure, if it gives any, is not healthy.

The necessity of timeliness or fitness to the truest beauty, and the beauty of everything in its true time and place, these then are the two sides of the truth of which I wish to speak to-day. I will not speak abstractly. I will come closely enough to practical matters of our daily life. It is a truth which has its applications everywhere. It touches what we may almost dare to call the responsibility of God. If the good and evil, the benefit and harm of things is not in things themselves, but in the places where they are put, then not on God who made the things of which the world is full, but upon man, who with his free will is always shifting tilings to suit himself, must lie the blame of the injury things do him. You lay your own stumbling block in your own way. God made the block indeed, but He made it for a part of the strength and beauty of the walls. It was you who dragged it down to the floor and insisted upon laying where you could stumble over it.

And again it touches the old question of failure or success in life. It lets us see why it is very often not the best furnished but the best arranged life that succeeds, not the richest but the most timely life; which is something that so often puzzles us.

And again it knits things into an interdependence with one another which is pleasing to the human mind. It rescues the universe from fragmentariness and shows us how “all is needed by every one, nothing is good or fair alone.” In all these ways this truth, that everything is beautiful in its time, and nothing is beautiful out of its time, comes close home to our lives.

And one thing is very striking about this truth, which indeed is characteristic always of the highest truths, that it becomes more manifestly true in things in proportion as their nature rises. It is less manifest in the lower, and more manifest in the higher natures. See what I mean. Everything in the world must be in its true place and time, or it is not beautiful. That is true from the lowest to the highest; only with the lowest it is not easy to discover it. It does not seem to matter where the 1> ble lies, on this side of the road or on the other. It may indeed do sad mischief out of its place; but its place is a wide one. It may lie in many spots and do no harm, and seem to show all the beauty and render all the use of which it is capable. But the things of higher nature are more fastidious in their demands. The plant must have its proper soil to feed its roots upon, or its bright flowers lose their beauty, and even there, only in one short happy sea son of the year is it in its glory, while the pebble keeps its lustre always. Higher still, comes the animal, and he has more needs which must be met, more arrangements that must be made, a more definite place in which he must be set, before he can do his best. Some sort of a home to live in, some faint beginning of society, some growth and education, bring him to his best beasthood. And then highest of all comes man, and with his highest life comes the completest dependence upon circumstances. He is the least independent creature on the earth. The most beautiful in his right time and place, he is the most wretched and miserable out of it. He is the- most liable to be thrown out of place of all the creatures. He must have all the furnishings of life, friendships, family, ambitions, cultures of every kind, or his best is not attained.

And this same law holds between different kinds of men. The highest natures are most dependent upon timeliness and fitness. They must act at the right moment. There are such things as right moments for them. Have you not been often struck by seeing how a commonplace and ordinary man will fall in with the world anywhere, and make himself at home and be at ease and use his powers very isfactorily, while a man far his superior will stand waiting and awkward, apparently quite unable to get to work, until, by-and-by, all of a sudden, his opportunity arrives, and instinctively he knows it and falls to work, and in an hour has done more than the other did in days. It is not mere fastidiousness. It is not conceit. Fastidiousness and conceit are the shams and imitations of which this is the genuine. Fastidiousness betrays itself by its self-consciousness and by its unwillingness to step in, even when the true time has come. We all know this difference of men. There are men about us who we feel might have lived at any age from Abraham’s time down to ours, and they would have been just as much at home in any of the strange old centuries as they are here. A little change of dress, a little different manners, a different language, and that would be all the alteration. But there are other men whom you cannot transfer. They belong here and now. You are sure that in any other time their lives must have been hampered and dumb. Now they find voice and power, because their time is come.

When the great feast was ready at Jerusalem, and the brethren of Jesus were going up from Nazareth, as they went every year, they urged Jesus to go with them. And his answer was, “My time is not yet come, but your time is always ready.” There wa« something so sad and so noble in his words. They, with no recognized mission, might go when and where they would. They, with no burden on their shoulders, might walk freely over the whole earth. But he, with his task, his duty, his Father’s name to glorify, his brethren’s souls to save, the kingdom of heaven to set up, he must wait till the door opened. He could walk only where the way was wide enough for him to pass with his burden. Nothing can be farther from the coveted ideal which hangs before the eyes of multitudes of our young men, the easy, ready man of the world, who is at home anywhere, with a conscience that can pass through any crack, with convictions that can turn to any color, with the self-possession that succeeds everywhere; nothing can be farther from him than Jesus was, with his clear purposes and strong truth and mission of God. 0 that you all could learn that! Such universal popularity, such universal adaptability is not the highest character or life. As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it. The more truly and earnestly you come to do anything, the more clearly you will see that you cannot do everything. He who is truly good must be good for something. To be good for everything is to be good for nothing. The strength of a life makes up for and glorifies its specialness. The dog with his kennel full mocks at the lion with his solitary whelp. “Yes, only one, but a lion,” answers the proud beast. Always the higher a life is, the more it is beautiful in its place, and can be beautiful nowhere else.

It belongs then to the highest and most gifted lives, to seek their places in the world. It is the prerogative of their superiority. Surely it would be good for men if they could learn this early. It would scatter many delusions. It would dispijiat«- the folly of universal genius. Tin- tendency oi time is to special education, to find what every man is fit for and to train him specially for that. It may be carried to excess. It may be made too narrow. In their desire for special culture men may cut off those streams of education which, flowing in from distant regions upon every side, supply and feed the current of the special life. The special life may be too narrowly conceived. That is of course the danger. But still we cannot help rejoicing in the increasing prominence of the idea that every being whom the world contains has his true place, written in the very make of his nature, and that to find that place and fill it is success for him. To help him find that place and make him fit to fill it, is the duty of his educators in all their various degrees.

Such an idea is always tending to become religious, is always on the brink of faith. It does not seem possible for men to permanently hold it and yet be satisfied with a chance-governed world. Who made the nature and the work for one another? Who touched the unborn soul and the undone task such harmonious colors that, when by-and-by they met, their colors recognized each other, and blended into a beauty of active life, which all the world could see? The whole idea is full of God. Men may state it as atheistically as they will, they cannot get God out of it. Like every assertion of order in the universe, it must ultimately be an assertion of Him.

And then again, the constant holding of such an idea about a man’s own life is always tending, to make a man personally religious. The man who thinks he is an accident, and has no place, grows flippant with his life. But all that made the lives of Moses and David, John and Paul and Luther, serious, responsible, devout, comes to the humblest man who is able to believe in a true place, a true calling for himself. It must come to the whole world, making it lofty, earnest, tuning its whole music to a higher key, when this truth of the beauty, the necessity of timeliness shall grow everywhere clear.

So seek your place and fill it. You know the satisfactory feeling that we all have when one of the universal men who has been good at everything and so good for nothing, who has been slipping about loosely over the surface of life, in everybody’s way, for years, at last suddenly finds the hollow he was made for and drops into it and fits it. It is an immense satisfaction and relief. Perhaps it seems at first as if he had disappeared; but by-and-by we find that he has been taken up by the great system of life and made a portion of it. His movement be comes orderly, makes part of the universal rhythm. He has found his time and place, and become beautiful. There are children in your households, boys in your schools, the very best boys there, who make the most trouble because, being the best boys, the largest, strongest characters, they most need to find their place. They most truly have a place to find. The average commonplace boy fits in almost anywhere, and makes no trouble. But in that grace less, awkward, interfering character there is the real pivot, which if you can help into its right place, will help to hold the structure of the world together and let many other characters revolve upon it.

So much we say of men, of human U-ings in or out of their true place and time. But let us now pass on to something else. Let us go on to see how everything, all the events of life, all of God’s dispensations, get their real beauty or ugliness from the times in which they come to us or in which we come to them. We are always giving things absolute arbitrary characters. This thing is good, that thing is bad, we say; but really badness or goodness, beauty or ugliness are not in things themselves, but in the ways those things relate themselves to us. Look at trouble, look at temptation. They are not beautiful, surely, we say. The calm soul, living its peaceful life upon the sunny plain, gathering its flowers, singing its gentle songs, sees stalking up towards it, hiding the sunlight from it, casting its shadow far before itself, the great figure of a coming woe. Does it seem beautiful? Can the arms open to welcome it? See how the form withers and seems to shrink, drops in upon itself with terror as the trouble comes on pitilessly. But by-and-by when it has come, when the soul smitten by it has had to lay hold with new strength on Christ, whuii the superficial things of life have all been blown away and the real precious things of life have been displayed anew under the tempest — what then? Is there no beauty in the trouble then? Ask many a heart who never knew what spiritual beauty was until it saw it under the form of timely sorrow.

Even punitive sorrow, punishment, has a beauty about it which men are not slow to feel. When a man has been sinning and sinning on, and when at last an exposure and pain comes, and then by the shame and purification of that suffering another life begins, is there anything more beautiful than that pain standing there “in his place” between- the old life and the new, between the sin and the restoral? It is beautiful with reference to the past. It satisfies man’s feeling about the necessary consequence of sin, and it is beautiful with reference to the future. It clears the field for the new things that are to come.

If there is one thing especially of which many people cannot possibly believe that under any circumstances it should seem beautiful, I suppose it must be death. That must be always dreadful. Men seldom see any misery in life so great as to outweigh the misery of leaving it. But yet it comes to all of us that He who made death made it like all things else to be beautiful in his place and time. When a life has lived its days out in happiness, grown old with constantly accumulating joys, and then at last, before decay has touched it or the ground grows soft under its feet, the door opens and it enters into the new youth of eternity: when a young man has tried his powers here and dedicated them to God, and then is called to the full use of their perfected strength in the very presence of the God whom he has loved: when a man has lived for his bivtlnvn, and the time comes that his life cannot help them any longer, but his death can put life into dead truths and send enthusiasm into fainting hearts: when death comes as rest to a man who is tired with a long fight, or as victory to a man who leaves his enemies baffled behind him on the shore of time, in all these times is not death beautiful? “Nothing in all his life became this man like his leaving it,” they said of one who died.

Look at the death of Christ. Men said, “It is terrible. It is disgraceful.” Christ himself shrank and trembled at it. It was what we call a violent, an untimely death, but it was really in its true time, and all the world has felt its beauty. For Jesus it was victory and peace. For the world it was salvation and new life. On the evening of Good Friday, in spite of all their pain and disappointment, His mother and disciples must have begun to feel already how beautiful it was.

We transport ourselves to God’s standpoint and imagine how He must think about it all. To Him, seeing the whole, seeing both worlds, the passage from one to the other must be as natural as is the passage from one period of this life to another. A man may be unprepared for it, and so the passage from boyhood into manhood may he a dreadful, ruinous thing. A man may be unprepared for it, and so the passage from time into eternity maybe dreadful and ruim. us, like any other passage, but in itself not one more than the other. One, like the other, is the summons of God, to come on, to come up, to something richer, larger, more complete.

One law applies in full to the coming of different stages in the life of man. Each period of life is beautiful in its time. Old age is beautiful when men are really old, and youth when men are really young; but everybody feels the lack of beauty when the character of either period is transferred into the years of the other. A precocious boy and a young old man alike repel us with an incongruity. This is why boys shun their companion who is solemn and wise beyond his years, and men laugh at a man who does not know how to grow old, but keeps the ways of youthfulness long after the freshness of youth which gave them all their charm is past. It seems as if life might all be so- simple and so beautiful, so good to live, so good to look at, if we could only think of it as one long journey, where every day’s march had its own separate sort of beauty to travel through; and so if we could go on clinging to no past, accepting every new present as it comes, finding everything beautiful in its time, and suiting our selves to each new beauty with continual growth. And that can come to pass in the soul that really loves and lives in a living, loving God.

There are continual applications of our truth — the necessity of timeliness to beauty — in the religious life. “Everything beautiful in his time,” says God. Then each experience of Christian life is good and comely in its true place, when it comes in the orderly sequences of Christian growth, and only there; not beautiful wnen it comes artificially, forced in where it does not belong. It would do many Christians givut good to learn that truth. A young Christian, just beginning the new life, earnest and glowing and iin mature, loving Christ deeply, but not having yet fathomed his helpfulness, hears some old saint tell ing of the calm trust in the Saviour which has grown strong in long experience of guidance and mercy. The ardent boy, full of his hopes and fears, gazes upon that tranquil peace, and is fascinated by it. He wonders why it is not his. Perhaps he tries to make believe that it is his, to drill himself into an imitation of it. But no! Everything in its time! That is the grace of ripened life. It will not come to the young experience. The efforts to make it come, the imitations of it, are unreal and bad.

And so again the other way. The aged Christian, full of the peace of eventide, with the long shadows lying back upon the life that he has lived, will often grow anxious and discouraged because the glow and thrill and eagerness of his first faith has passed away. This simply trusting Christ and resting in his love, seems dull and spiritless, beside the excited fervor of his first conversion. And so with some galvanic movement, he tries to reproduce the quick excited activity which he remembers.

So the soul that God has been training into happy confidence sees another soul which God has been shaking with alarms, and reproaches itself because it is so tranquil, fears because it cannot fear.

So the soul which God is training in solitude thinks its life wasted because it is cut off from society, and the soul that God keeps in the very midst of its fellows sighs for the joy and culture of being alone.

If we could only know that in its time only is any Christian mood or condition beautiful, and that God only knows its time! When the day is over the stars will come, and then it is good to see them; but to see them before that, in the sunlight, you must go, men say, down to the bottom of a well, where you do not belong, which is unnatural and unhealthy. When we have done with earth the heaven will come; and, till that, only such heaven — and it is not a little — as is possible upon the dear old earth.

We ought to learn everywhere not to value moods for their own sakes, and so not to try to produce them. They are mere symptoms. Not symptoms, but disease and health, are the important things. People are always setting their hearts on one particular grace or quality, and thinking that it is the per feet character, and so cultivating it and practicing it in the same form under all circumstances indiscriminately. That is what makes the one-sided and misshapen men that we see everywhere. One man says, “Self-reliance is a noble, manly thing,” and so his whole notion of strong life is to be self-reliant everywhere, and he becomes totally undocile and arrogant. He is as self-reliant in forming his ideas about the truths of God and eternity, as he is in deciding about a turn of the market or the chances of a bargain. His self-reliance ceases to be respect a Me, ami grows distressing when it stands up nnul; in Hit.: presence of the most sacred mysteries.

Or, it may be, doubt and hesitation seem beautiful to you — as sometimes indeed they are — but you take it for granted that they are always good, and l.y-and-by, you are weak where you ought to be strong; you are hesitating where you ought to be acting. And all the world is sneering at you, and you deserve its sneers.

Or levity, which has its graceful places among pleasant trifling things, is brought in among sacred and awful truths, and how ugly its jesting face and tinsel dress and tinkling bells appear!

Or subtlety, which has its province in curious questions of the intellect, begins to meddle with the clear questions of the conscience, with principle, with right and wrong, and it is disagreeable and repulsive.

No! no one mood is the whole character. Truth, courage, these are universal; but the moods that these create are always changing. The same truthfulness which makes a man bold at one time, will make him fearful at another. What we need is to be simply courageous and truthful men, and let the firms in which our manhood shows itself freely vary with the varying circumstances, each beautiful in its own time. We may lose what men call consistency, but we shall keep what is better — truth and freedom, without which there can be no growth.

Again, it seems as if this truth of ours lay at the bottom of any clear notion about the character of sin. We say that we are sinful, but really we are always passing over the essential sinfulness into the things around us. It is these wicked things that make us wicked. But here comes up our truth, that there are no wicked things; that wickedness is not in things, but in the displacement and misuse of things; that there is nothing which, kept in its true place and put to its true use, is not beautiful and good. Here is a man who says his business makes him selfish. Coward that he is, he meanly lays the blame of his mean life upon his merchandise and ledgers. But no such pretense will pass. In the next store to him there is a brother merchant, who out of just the same business, has been growing charitable and generous and larger-hearted every year. Here is a woman who says that society is responsible for her frivolousness; that no one can be purely earnest who lives in the midst of this fashionable world. But some other woman by her side confutes her, for she has shown how full social life may fill the character of what is best and sacredest. Here is a man who tells me that no student of physical science can be cognizant of spiritual life or reverent of spiritual forces. On his rocks and bones he lays the blame of his godlessness. But some reverent disciple of a spiritual mas ter convicts him, as he shows how from the deepest study of the laws of God, the soul may come to an ever profounder faith in the God of law. In every case we wretchedly impute sin to things. But when we once are taught that things cannot be sinful — that sin is a quality which can only belong to wills — then back upon our wills falls the stigma which we have tried to cast off on the inanimate material with which we have to do. The much abused things to lift up their heads and iling back the disgrace which we have tried so ignomiiiiously to shift from ourselves to them. The shops cry out indignantly, “We do not make the misers.” Society declares, u I do not make the triflers.” The rocks and bones protest, “We do not make the atheists.” They all hold up the noble uses to which they might have been put, and say, “Who was it that chose to prostitute us and degrade us?” Back on the wills of men, where it belongs, falls the responsibility of sin, and the convicted soul, instead of going about any longer complaining that God has put it into such a wicked world, and abusing the sinfulness of things, owns its own wickedness, and in clear-sighted, manly penitence cries out, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

This last idea has its encouraging and hopeful side. The soul, wanting to get away from sin, has not to make its escape out of a wilderness of sinful things, in whose midst it is impossible to be good. ’ lie sin is in the man himself. He must be changed, and then these things about him, just the same tl, still, change also with his altered life. He finds them capable of unguessed uses. The hammer with which he once destroyed, and in which it seemed to him as if the spirit of destruction lay, he finds now yielding easily to his new7 desire to build. How deep the old story of Genesis goes! The earth which sin turned to a wilderness, holiness turns back again into a garden! For sin and holiness are not in things, but in souls; and all things are beautiful in the time when a soul uses them for holy uses with a loving, humble, and obedient life.

Let this be then the word with which we close. The human soul sits at the centre of everything, and Christ sits at the centre of the human soul. If he changes us, then everything will be changed to us. “He that sitteth upon the throne saith, Behold I make all things new!” If the world is ugly and bitter and cruel to you: if circumstances taunt and persecute you: if everything you touch is a strain and a temptation, do not stand idly wishing that the world were changed. The change must be in you. To the new heart all things shall be new. The new man shall see already the new heaven and the new earth. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; and the new creature is immediately in the new creation. Some of you know already by daily experience what that means. And for all of you, it waits to be revealed, if you will let Christ do His work in you.