T[ This image partially finds place in the " Sayings of the Jewish Fathers": E. Tarphon said, "The day is short, and the task is great, and the workmen are sluggish, and the reward is much, and the Master of the house is urgent."
2. The hremty and uncertainty of life. — "The day is short." When another year has gone into the dead past beyond our recall for ever, when we look back and think how rapidly, and, it may be, how unprofitably, it has glided away, the impression of this truth may be vivid upon us ; but we seldom feel it as we ought. It is not useless admonition that Scripture gives us when it insists so often on life's brevity, comparing human existence to the most fleeting things in nature ; to the mist which disappears before the sun, to the cloud driven by the winds, to the shadows that flit across the landscape, to the smoke that ascends and mingles with the atmosphere, to the leaf of the forest tree, and to the flower of the field. It cannot be compared to any of the more stable objects of nature. How many generations of men has the earth successively borne on her bosom; on how many generations have the sun and the moon looked down ! There is
ST. JOHN — 27
4i8 A TIME TO WORK
many a tree still fresh and vigorous, although the hands that planted it have for centuries been dust. Man is far more fragile even than many of his own works. From the pyramids of Egypt more than " forty centuries look down upon us " ; but where are the builders ?
The day of our life is as uncertain as it is short. It is a day in which there is often no gradual fading away of the light to warn us that it is drawing near to a close. It is often with man's life as with countries in other zones than ours, where night, instead of climbing gradually up the heavens and giving evidence of its approach by an ever-deepening twilight, overspreads it at once and envelops all living creatures in sudden darkness. In the course we have to run there is no point, however near the one from which we started, where our race may not terminate. In the whole period of life usually allotted to man there is no year, month, week, day, or even instant, but it may be the last to each individual. There is no truth of which we are more frequently or strikingly reminded.
^ Have you measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities ? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that — that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? ^
^ It is not merely of the literal shortness of our time, or the possible nearness of death, that our Lord's words should set us thinking, when He warns us that we must work while it is day. If we measure our life by the things we should accomplish in it, by the character it should attain to, by the purposes that should be bearing fruit in it, and not by mere lapse of time, we soon come to feel how very short it is, and the sense of present duty grows imperative. It is thus that the thoughtful man looks at his life ; and he feels that there is no such thing as length of days which he can without blame live carelessly, because in these careless days critical opportunities will have slipped away irrecoverably ; he will have drifted in his carelessness past some turning-point which he will not see again, and have missed the so-called chances that come no more.^
T[ I have long said: ''The night cometh," etc., but that does not make it right to act in a hurry. Better not do a thing than do it badly. I must be patient and wait on God. If it is His
* Ruskin, Sesame arwL Lilies ( Works, xviii. 62).
* Bishop Percival, Sermons at Rugby, 27.
ST. JOHN IX. 4 419
Will I should do more He will give me time. I am not serving Him by blundering.^
Our life is long. Not so, wise Angels say
Who watch us waste it, trembling while they weigh
Against eternity one squandered day.
Our life is long. Not so, the Saints protest,
Filled full of consolation and of rest;
" Short ill, long good, one long unending best."
Our life is long. Christ's word sounds different: " Night Cometh ; no more work when day is spent." Eepent and work to-day, work and repent.
Lord, make us like Thy Host, who day nor night Eest not from adoration, their delight, Crying, " Holy, Holy, Holy ! " in the height.
Lord, make us like Thy Saints, who wait and long Contented: bound in hope and freed from wrong, They speed (may be) their vigil with a song.
Lord, make us like ThyseK : for thirty-three Slow years of toil seemed not too long for Thee, That where Thou art, there Thy Beloved might be.
(1) The need for diligence, — We ought to be misers of our time and opportunities. If Jesus Christ said, " I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day ; the night cometh," some of us ought very specially to say it, and to feel it, because the hour when we shall have to lay down our tools is coming very near, and the shadows are lengthening. If you had been in the fields in these summer evenings during the last few days, you would have seen the haymakers at work with more and more diligence as the evening drew on darker and darker. Some of us are at the eleventh hour. Let us fill it with diligent work.^