Trimmer (R.), Thirsting for the Living Waters, 132.
Tyng (S. H.), Tlie People's Pulpit, iv. 205.
Christian World Pulpit, Iviii. 65 (M. G. Pearse).
Guardian, Ixvii. (1912) 418 (J. W. Willink).
Homiletic Review, 1. 379 (M. G. Pearse).
Literary Churchman, xxiii. (1877) 540.
National Preacher, xxxiv. 33 (A. Barnes).
Preacher's Magazine, viii. 557 (T. Puddicombe) ; xxii. 67 (J. Edwarda).
The Right Use of Time.
So teach us to number our days,
That we may get us an heart of wisdom. — Ps. xc. 12.
1. This psalm of man's pilgrimage through all generations has in it, says Ewald, " something unusually arresting, solemn, sinking deep into depths of the Divinity. Moses might well have been seized by these awful thoughts at the close of his wanderings ; and the author, whoever he be, is clearly a man grown grey with vast experience, who here takes his stand at the close of his earthly course." The verses of the psalm have become the funeral hymn of Christendom, which every Church recites at the burial of its dead.
The slow, sad experience of life wrought out in the Psalmist a twofold result — he has learned the secret both of detachment and of attachment. This aged pilgrim grows more and more weaned from the world and detached from things trivial and temporal; he stands aloof and absolved from the accidents of existence. But he clings closer and closer still to things unseen and eternal, and is made partaker of their everlastingness. Such should be the effect of a right numbering of the days and years as they escape us — to teach at last that, though the world passeth away, and the lust thereof, yet he who doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
2. But he has learned more than that. He has learned that God is from everlasting to everlasting. It would help to cheer us if we could lay this thought to heart, numbering our days, not merely to realize their brevity, but to realize by contrast the length of God's years. We have but a short time to work, and it is well to remember that, in order that we may be diligent. But God has a whole eternity wherein to work, and it is well to remember that also, so that we may cease from fretfulness and
228 THE RIGHT USE OF TIME
impatience at the slow progress of the Divine Kingdom. It is by so numbering both our years and God's that we attain to a wise heart.
^ Time was Napoleon's most precious commodity, and for every stage and state of life he had a routine from which he deviated most unwillingly. In these years his days were spent in the careful husbanding of every hour.^
L
A Prayer for Instruction.
"Teach us."
1. At first thought it would seem as though we needed not to be instructed on such a subject. It would seem as though man's mortality were so evident that it would be impossible for him to hide it from himself. Nevertheless, he does hide it from himself, and on this account no prayer is more important than the prayer of the text. The demonstration of human mortality is in a hundred generations of the dead. It is in the ground beneath our feet, which is billowy with graves full of the dust which once lived in human forms and spoke and was loved. It is in the long line of the one hundred thousand human lives which every day pass the boundary-line from time into eternity and melt into nothingness before our eyes. It is in every tick of the clock which marks the passage of some immortal soul and declares the death- rate of the world. Yet, humanity at large does not realize the mortality of humanity. So thoroughly unrealized is the mortality of man that the first condition of right living, the fundamental thought of a wise life, is ignored and undreamed of by thousands and thousands.
^ We can number other men's days and years, and think they , will die ere it be long, if we see them sick or sore or cold : but we cannot number our own. When two ships meet on the sea, they which are in one ship think that the other ship doth sail exceed- ingly fast, but that their ship goeth fair and softly, or ratlier standeth still, although in truth one ship saileth as fast as the other ; so every man thinks that the other post and run and tiy ' W. M. Sloane, Napoleon Bonaparte, ii. 253.
PSALM xc. 12 229
to the grave, but that himself standeth stock still, although, in- deed, a year with him is no longer than it is with the other.^
^ I remember, in the seminary, a fellow student who had upon the crown of his head a tumour that was constantly grow- ing. The physicians told him that it was impossible, by any efifort of human skill, to relieve him. He was waiting the moment when, in its growth, it should at last pierce the hard bone of the skull ; and he knew that the moment that should be accomplished, he would fall dead. God has spared him these many years to preach the gospel. But, when others were full of frolic and fun, I noted the serious mirth of that man. He lived in a division of his days. He counted nothing in the future. He finished each day's work when the night came.^