THESE words sum up what was certainly the Apostolic mind as to the
position of Christians in this world. They were members, they could not help
being members, as we are, of a vast and powerful and complex
association--human society; but with all its great attributes it wanted
one--it wanted permanence. "The world passeth away"--is passing away,
as we work or speak. "Here we have no continuing city"--we have
indeed a city, we have a wonderful and beneficent citizenship, we could not
live [2] without it; we owe debts beyond repayment, duties of the
loftiest and most sacred kind, to human society; but society is with
us and about as to-day, and to-morrow it and we are to be so much
farther on in our road to successive changes, by which it becomes
something quite different from what it is now, something perhaps which we
cannot imagine now; and we disappear from life and the visible world.
But though "here we have no continuing city, we do seek one to
come." Born amid change--surrounded by change in every form, knowing nothing
by experience but change, the subject and the sport of change--the human
heart yet distinctly clings to its longing for the unchanging and the
eternal. Christians, so thought the Apostle, not only long for it but look
for it. "We seek that which is to come;" seek it, believing that we have
found it and shall one day reach it.
[3] We do not need Scripture to teach us that we have "here no
continuing city"--"that the fashion of this world passeth away"--that
nothing "continueth in one stay;" though only Scripture can teach us to seek
with hope for that "which is to come." "From the morning till the evening
the time is changed, and all things"--the glory of the dawn, the beauty of
the sunset, "are soon done before the Lord." In this world of ours, from the
first rise of thought, from the first throb of consciousness, no one but has
known and owned this inherent necessity of our condition; and human
inventiveness and speech have been strained to recognise and record its
pressure on the human mind--to evade, perhaps, and disguise the public
confession of its inevitable certainty; to express with adequate force the
keenness with which it is realised in the individual life. Human pride,
knowing it, has tried to [4] defy it; the monuments of these mighty
attempts, in Egypt, in Assyria, in India, in China, have survived the
centuries: there was once an empire which seemed as solid as the world;
there was a city which called itself the Eternal City; and their ruins, like
the drifted fragments of a wreck, battered but undestroyed, are the
witnesses in our museums, or in desolate places of the earth, to those
enormous powers of change over which mortal men once thought to triumph. It
is in vain; even the "unchanging East" must go through its revolutions; even
the Roman Empire must pass away. [1] The law of unceasing endless change
spreads over [5] all present and visible things, the greatest and the
least. Change, subtle, imperceptible, universal , is the puzzle and the
riddle with which philosophy has to grapple;--have things any being, or is
it all a becoming, ending as soon as it has begun, a perpetual flux, like a
river never two moments the same? are things but appearances, and shifting
forms, and not realities? what, under all these accidents of an ever-moving
scene, is the substance and foundation which stands firm and upholds them?
Great philosophical systems have risen on the answers to these questions;
and on their failure to solve the enigma they have been overthrown and
fallen, and added fresh illustrations to the uniformity of change. The fact
and the power of change--what is all history but the [6] picture of
its vicissitudes and its epochs? What is political wisdom but the
recognition of its conquests and the direction of its course? What a
monument and evidence is all language of its continuous actions and strange
results! How do the commonest and most trivial words which we are obliged to
use--"Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow"--"hours and weeks and months and
years"--witness, like the mottoes on sundials, to its steady current, which
none can check or escape? So thought and interest and the atmosphere of
opinion go through the same continuous process of change. Slowly but surely
the greatest intellectual revolutions come about. The truths of one age are
the questions and doubts of the next, the exploded errors and fallacies of a
third. Ideas, modes of argument, assumptions, philosophical methods which
governed minds in one century become unintelligible in another. [7]
Even the tests of genius alter. Tastes arise and depart--assert their
supremacy and then are laughed to scorn. The masterpieces of to-day fall
flat and fail to move us to-morrow. These boasted powers of creative and
judicial mind--they too are subject to the empire of change. Poetry and all
art confess and recall its power, for they are beholden to it for their
noblest and most magnificent materials. Their triumphs have been to arrest
and embody its momentary and evanescent flow. They have sought in it the
source of what is most pathetic, most tender, most inspiring--ideals which
it has just shown and then taken away, the light which came once and never
again. Indeed, they can bind us by a spell, and cheat us into forgetting
that irresistible march of change of which they are the evidence. They were
before us, and will outlive us--picture and building and poem; and we,
fluctuating [8] between the obstinate certainty of the present moment
and the knowledge that all is passing, vanishing, tending "visibly not be;"
we, longing for permanence, read into their past and into their future the
life which, as it passes, is now our own: like that old man in the poet's
story [2] who all his life long had had before him in the refectory at his
meals a great picture of the Last Supper, till the picture grew into the
reality--
"And he was fain invest
The lifeless thing with life from his own soul."
"Here daily do we sit,
And thinking of my brethren, dead, dispersed,
Or changed, or changing, I not seldom gaze
Upon this solemn company unmoved
By shock of circumstance or lapse of years,
Until I cannot but believe that they--
They are in truth the substance, we the shadows."
[9] Such things touch us, as they well may. But what are these to
the instances, when we meet them, of the changes of our moral nature--to a
life which grows poorer with its years--to the strange declensions of
character, the chilling of enthusiasm, the quenching of love, the falls of
the strong, the uncharitableness of the good, the failure of a great
promise, the shaming of a great past? what are passing years, failing
strength, and coming death to the sight of altering and dying goodness?
"Here we have no continuing city." We are all of us under the unalterable
necessity in one way or another of change. It is the absolute condition of
existing, now and here. How shall we feel about this fact, as certain as
death? how shall we meet it, when we no longer merely know it, but imagine
and [10] realise it?--no longer merely hear of it by the hearing of
the ear, but see it with the inner eye of the living mind. It may impress
and affect us in many ways. It may darken or it may brighten life; it may
depress and discourage, or it may inspire with boundless hope. We may find
in it the highest summons to courage or the excuse for the most enervating
sentimentalism. We may bow our heads in sullen despair under the yoke of its
necessity; we may cease to strive, and throw up the game in the vain attempt
to master or to stem it; or we may see in it more gain than loss, and
welcome it charged with infinite possibilities of recovery and advance. We
may meet it, thankful that we are born under its dominion and its hopes; or
we may meet it with the indifference with which we resign ourselves to what
is inevitable; or with the regrets which see in it that which has robbed us
of what we [11] most loved and trusted, only a companionship with
bereavement, decay, degeneracy; or with irritation at its monotony, its
fruitlessness, its aimlessness, its undirected and purposeless course. We
may meet it in placid submission to the order of natural law, curbing the
restless instincts of the soul for something more and better, without
ambition for a more stable and unchequered lot, without aspiration and
without repining. We may meet it as fatalists, or as idlers, or as those who
said, "Our time is a very shadow that passeth away; let no flower of the
spring pass by us; for this is our portion, and our lot is this." There is
no escaping from the consciousness of change. From the first, men have met
it as wise men or as fools--with mockery and with selfish riotousness, or
with the serious thought due to one of the master-facts of human life.
"Here we have no continuing city." How [12] does the Bible teach
us to think and feel about this truth, which often comes upon us so
unexpectedly, with such piercing force? The Bible, we know, was written that
we, "through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope" in the
changes and chances of this mortal life, as well as in its sins, its
temptations, its terrible evils. The Bible, which has told us of the
presence and victory of our Lord, of the life and immortality which He has
brought to light, teaches us abundantly what to think of change, both in its
good and its evil, and of that unchanging glory in which it is to be
swallowed up. But is there in the Bible any special guiding for judgement,
for temper, for self-discipline, for everyday feeling and everyday
behaviour, under the disquieting consciousness of change--any ever-ready
counter-charm when the stern facts of change present themselves
oppressively, insupportably? [13] Doubtless a sentence from the mouth
of Christ, an inspiration of an Apostle, can carry strength and comfort to
the soul. But we have that, too, which was a source of teaching and a stay
to Apostles, and from the words of which, the words of men though taught by
the Holy Ghost, even the Son of Man deigned to draw language for His feeling
and thought. We have the Book of Psalms, the mirror of the deepest and most
varied spiritual experience, the inspirer of the strongest feelings of
religious assurance. In the Book of Psalms we may read how the believer in
God may learn to feel and to act when he sees the great currents of change
sweep by him, and feels himself borne upon their tide.
I need not remind you how, throughout the Psalms, we meet the impressive
recognition of this aspect of life and the world. They are full of the
presence, the greatness, the [14] eventfulness of change--change
going on for good or for evil, for joy or for sorrow, in outward
circumstances, in the inward life; changes physical, material, political,
moral; vicissitudes in the fortunes of men and nations, varying states,
perhaps most rapid alternations and successions of feeling in the soul
within, in its outlook towards God and things outside it. The writers of the
Psalm knew well what change was; they lived under the pressure of great
catastrophes, of great failures of hope, of great degeneracies and great
disappointments, exposed in their little corner of the earth to the enormous
movements round them, ever tempting or troubling them, ever threatening to
overwhelm and consume them. And they knew, too, the deeper and more
far-reaching changes that come over character and conscience, and man's
relations to God, and the varying and never stable scene of man's
disobedience. They [15] felt as keenly as any despairing or indulgent
Epicurean thinker how fleeting are our moments of life, how wide and
restless the processes of change. But in this rush and whirl of the things
of sense and time the Psalmist had one fixed point. That fixed point was the
sovereignty of God--the true, the just, the holy. That amid the changes and
chances of visible things, that in the perpetual running out of time, that
amid the alternations of life and death, remaining ever the same. Of that
the Psalmists felt as sure as they felt sure of the vicissitudes of which
they were the subject. Blinded, dizzied, perplexed, overwhelmed, like men
struggling with a storm, not knowing their road or how the Hand was guiding
them, far less knowing how to connect their experience with the secrets and
the counsels of His righteousness--their trust was absolute and boundless in
that Eternal Rule. Alive as the were to [16] change and all its
tremendous powers in things below, yet from their thought of change was
never absent the thought of the unchanging Master of all changes. In the
heights and in the depths, this was the unfailing stay and refuge of their
soul--"The Lord is King."
The idea of the sovereignty of God is the counterpart throughout the
Psalms, set over against all that is unsatisfying, disastrous, transitory,
untrustworthy, not only in man's condition but in the best he can do in it.
The Psalms are always the expression of the will to fulfil God's purpose,
thought very often of that will baffled; but they always fall back, when
that will is baffled, not on despair, but on the conviction that man's
"times are in God's hand." That great idea of the sovereignty of God, as
philosophical as it is certainly Christian, has perhaps in our days been
thrown, by the tendency of [17] opinion and argument,
disproportionately into the background. There have been times when it has
been made too prominent, at the expense of His other attributes, His
justice, His goodness, His loving mercy. It has been urged to justify daring
and terrible speculations; and loyalty to it has been though to require the
unshrinking acceptance of the most extreme consequences. But in the writers
of the Psalms it is no text for speculations or debate; it is a matter of
the deepest practical conviction, of the clearest religious insight. It
alone would bear the strain of human anxiety. Without it, for them, there
would be no religion; certainly no life, no comfort or refuge in religion.
With them it means that God is in the midst of us, taking part in all that
concerns and interests men; they ask not how--they know that they could not
comprehend it; but from the throne of the universe, guiding, ruling, [18]
judging men, as He rules the worlds and all that He has made. That great
song of the 100th Psalm, which still, as it has so often done, collects the
voices of thousands, is the final expression of this faith--"Be ye sure that
the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves: we are
His people, and the sheep of His pasture . . . . The Lord is gracious; His
mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth from generation to generation."
That other Psalm, which from time out of mind in the Church has been the
daily invitation to prayer and praise, is the daily witness and
acknowledgement of God's kingdom--"O come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us
heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. . . . In His hand are all
the corners of the earth; and the strength of the hills is His also. . . . O
come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker."
Here is [19] summed up the answer of the Book of Psalms to time and
change and death.
The Psalmists realised that they had "no continuing city" in a way which
is far beyond any experience of ours. They knew a state of society which
could rely on nothing settled; which was liable at any moment, as is the
case still in parts of the world, to be tormented and torn to pieces by
insolent and lawless wickedness, to be shaken to its foundations by some
frenzy or fashion of false religion, to be crushed down into utter ruin by
some alien conqueror. They believed that they were the people of God and had
His promises; and yet what they saw was, these promises unfulfilled,
recalled, reversed; apparently passing away into nothingness. They, the
"people of God's holiness," saw in the midst of them, trampling on all right
and holiness, "the bloodthirsty and deceitful man." They, the elect of the
Lord of Hosts, [20] saw the enemy and the avenger" master amid the
ruins of God's holy place, and for generation after generation felt
themselves the slaves and spoil of the heathen. What wonder that the voice
of defeat and humiliation sounds with such tragic repetition in the Book of
Psalms. "Hath God indeed forgotten to be gracious? and will He shut up His
loving-kindness in displeasure?" But what is the other side of this? It is
that, with perhaps one and that only an apparent exception [3], the voice of
unalloyed and uncomforted despair is never heard there. With the wail torn
from the heart by shame and agony comes next moment the remembrance of hat
Eternal King of mercy and righteousness, Whose kingdom endures from end to
end, while empires rise and fall, and Whose ear hears with equal certainty
the cry of the poor and the blasphemy of the [21] cruel. In spite of
the daily evidence of experience, the wicked flourishing like a green
bay-tree, the power of the oppressor, the tongue of the slanderer and the
busy mocker; in spite of the long delay, the agonised appeal "How
long?"--"Why standest Thou so far off, O Lord, and hidest Thy face in the
needful time of trouble?"--in spite of all, the foundation stands sure and
unshaken by any accidents of mortal condition: "Thou art set in the throne
that judgest right. The Lord shall endure for ever; He hath also prepared
his seat for judgement. The Lord also will be a defence for the oppressed;
even a refuge in due time of trouble. And they that know Thy name will put
their trust in Thee; for Thou, Lord, has never failed them that seek Thee."
And so with the transitoriness of the lives and generations of men;
nowhere is a keener sense shown of it than in the Psalms. "Man [22]
walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up
riches,, and cannot tell who shall gather them." "Man being in honour hath
no understanding, but is compared to the beasts that perish." "Thou turnest
man to destruction; again Thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men; for a
thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is past as a
watch in the night." "As soon as Thou scatterest them they are even as a
sleep, and fade away suddenly like the grass. . . . For when Thou art angry
all our days are gone; we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that
is told." What is there to comfort and compensate for this dreary prospect?
Nothing but the unlimited trust in God's power and goodness and ever
watchful care. "My days are gone like a shadow, and I am withered like
grass"--there is the consciousness which must come to all men [23]
sooner or later--a consciousness in the Psalmist's case that these great
changes in his lot were not undeserved by a sinner--"and that because of
Thine indignation and wrath, for Thou hast taken me up and cast me down."
The great revelation of forgiveness and life and immortality was yet to
come; but the Psalmist's faith in the Eternal King of the World never
wavered. "The days of man are but as grass, for he flourisheth as a flower
of the field. For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone; and the
place thereof shall know it no more. But the merciful goodness of the Lord
endureth for ever and ever upon them that fear Him, and His righteousness
upon children's children." "When the breath of man goeth forth he shall turn
again to his earth; and then all his thoughts perish." The waste, the
throwing away of human souls, of human thoughts, of human affections, is
there any-[24]thing more strangely perplexing in the ruin of death?
But the answer is at hand. "Blessed is he that hath the God of Jacob for his
help, and whose hope is in the Lord his God; Who made heaven and earth, the
sea, and all that therein is; Who keepeth his promise for ever." Men died
and were buried, and their children after them. They knew that they must die
and be as though they had never been. They walked like shadows in the midst
of shadows round them. They felt to the full the swift shortness of life;
how soon it was over, how awful its inevitable changes. Yet they did not
faint. They knew that over them was the ever continuous rule of Him Who made
heaven and earth and all things in the. They doubted not that He keepeth His
promise for ever. And so with change and mortality in them and round them,
written even on the solid earth and the distant [25] heavens, they
broke into the exulting song, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the
foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of Thine hands. They
shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; they all shall wax old as a garment,
and as a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed: but Thou
art the same, and Thy years shall not fail. The children of Thy servants
shall continue, and their seed shall sstand fsat in Thy sight."
"Here we have no continuing city" any more than they had. But we know,
with a distinctness which all of them had not, of a "city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God"--a "house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens." But where is that passionate, delighted, triumphant
faith of those men of old? What have we of their joy and gladness at the
very thought of God, even amid the tumults of the nations and the overthrows
of [26] life, and the certainty that at the best they too must soon
"follow the generation of their fathers?" Where is that assurance which they
had that "to the godly there ariseth light in the darkness? He shall never
be moved; he will not be afraid of any evil tidings, for His heart standeth
fast and believeth in the Lord." Where is that "fearful joy" with which
they' responded even to the terrors of the world? "The floods are risen, O
Lord, the floods have lift up their voice; the floods life up their waves."
"The Lord sitteth above the water-flood, and the Lord remaineth a King for
ever. . . . The Lord shall give His people the blessing of peace." As surely
as they were as we are, in the experience of life, so surely had they this
lofty, burning faith, this never-failing, abundant hope. "What reward shall
I give unto the Lord for all the benefits which He hath done unto me? I will
receive [27] the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the
Lord." And so they cast themselves into the arms of God, and were
blessed--Oh that we could catch something of that faith and hope, as day by
day we repeat again and again their wonderful words. This life of ours,
locked and dovetailed into the vast framework of social existence, seems so
solid that it needs an effort of imagination to think of it shaken. But that
effort of imagination Scripture bids us make. It bids us think of ourselves
in totally new conditions, in utterly altered relations to all around us;
how strange, how awful, we know not, nor ever shall know here. It
bids us think of this world itself, passing through endless phases, till the
day of its doom. Search as we will, we can find nothing to rest upon,
nothing that will endure the real trial, but the faith of the Psalmists in
the eternal kingdom of God--[28] the faith of the Psalmists lit up by
the "grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ." May God grant us the heart
to have this faith--the faith of men--of men who are not afraid to
face their circumstances, who know the greatness of their venture, who are
not afraid to trust God, because their hearts go up to Him in longing and
self-surrender. "Truly God is loving unto Israel, even unto such as are of a
clean heart. Whom have I in heaven but Thee? My flesh and my heart faileth;
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever."
