' Katharine Tynau Hiuksou.
426 THE DEATH TO DIE
to pronounce a lucrative curse upon them. And this was the end of the man who had said, " Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his ! " In all history there is no more signal instance of the literal fulfilment of the most fearful impre- cation that ever was conceived or uttered: "Let his prayer be turned into sin ! "
^ There was a noble soul that strove to become the man, but another soul, light, vain, and lustful, throve meanwhile ; and in the reaction that followed the great scene upon the hills, it sprang forward at the head of its train of passions and overthrew the man of God in Balaam, " and Balaam the son of Beor they slew with the sword." "Lust dwells hard by hate." The soul that had now become the man naturally hated the people of the law, and so he sank swiftly from sin to sin, till he was found at last among the heathen dead.^
3. What are the lessons of the death of Balaam ? Chiefly these two: First, that no man should expect to die the death of the righteous who does not live the life of the righteous; and, second, that wishes, however earnest, do not necessarily bring the thing wished for.
(1) Why should any one expect to come to a good death who will not lead a good life ? This world is not governed by chance, or fate, or caprice. Surely there is a Eighteous Euler among us ; and He rules by just and equitable laws. More than this may we say : that there is a unity or a oneness, in the various parts of God's world, of such a kind, that, by looking at what is in one place, we can tell what must he in another. " Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit ; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." The Lord was speaking of trees and shrubs and plants ; in reality He was talking, in a figure, about the souls and the lives of men. If the life has been hard, sharp, and angry, and such that a bramble-bush is its proper emblem ; if a man has permitted his sins, like thick weeds, to choke the seed of spiritual life, what sense is there in looking for mellowness, and fruitage, and pleasant, profitable things in him when the summer is past and the autumn days are come ?
(2) Balaam wished that he might die the death of the
> J. M. Gibbon.
NUMBERS XXIII. lo 427
righteous. And in every such wish some things are implied the presence of which is better than their absence. There is first a knowledge of good. The man who so speaks knows something at least (as Balaam said) of the knowledge of the Most High. Again, the honest utterance of such a wish implies that, as there is knowledge in the understanding, so is there also life in the conscience. And yet how far was his wish from being fulfilled. Balaam knew well that he who would die the death of the righteous must first be righteous — must first have lived the life of the righteous. Conscious, as in his inmost soul he must have been, that he was at present far from that righteousness, that the whole bent of his heart was evil, that he was under the dominion of one overmastering passion which alone and of itself was turning all his religion into practical hypocrisy, he should have set himself with determined resolu- tion to unravel this web of deceit, to retrace his crooked steps, to seek that straight and narrow way from which he had so long and so obstinately wandered, to lay afresh the very foundations of his spiritual being, and become that which heretofore he had been satisfied to seem. He knew well that the distinction between the last end of the righteous and of the wicked is no arbitrary difference, but the equitable, the natural result of a long course of voluntary acts. To wish for the death, without resolving to live the life, of the righteous, is to dream of an effeci without a cause, of a harvest without a seed-time.
4. As for death-bed repentances, or late conversions, about which it would seem that no one could speak with too great caution, or too severe a reserve, men talk of them with a boldness which is effrontery. Who knows anything about the worth of such changes ? Are they really changes ? If he who at his last hour calls on God and professes repentance and faith, were to recover, who can say that he would not forget it all, and straightway go back to his old ways? Men have done so in a thousand cases : would they not always do so ? la it repentance to cease from sinning only when the power of sinning has gone? Is it not a mockery to style it repentance, when it is not the man who forsakes his sins, but his sins that