' R. W. Dale.
422 OUR ACCOUNTABILITY
but it lies -with ourselves to determine whether we will be sober or drunkards, whether we will be gluttonous or temperate.
^ When William Ellery Channing was a very little boy, his schoolmaster said to one of his school-fellows, " Why are you not a good child like William Channing ? " " Oh," replied the boy, " it is so easy for William Channing to be good." We, perhaps, have looked round upon friends of ours to whom the conflict we have to maintain is altogether unnecessary. The foes we have to fight with they never meet. The victories which we have to win for ourselves were won for them generations ago by the ancestors whose blood is in their veins. Shall we complain ? G-od forbid. Let us do for posterity what their ancestors have done for them, taking the rough conditions of our actual life, making the best of them, winning no praise from men for what we accompKsh — for they know not the difficulty of the work — rejoicing in this humbly and reverently, that we have to give account of ourselves to God.i
He JBxed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.*
II.
It is Inevitable.
" Each one of us shall give account."
1. Every man must give account of himself to God, We will not render our account by our fears, or our sensitiveness, or our bad memories, or our dulness of conscience, or our false and artificial views of truth and duty. We shall give it ; and yet He will receive or exact it in utter independence of us, He will read us off as being what we are, as being all that already He knows us to be. All the veils which hide us from each other, or from ourselves, will drop away before the glance of His eye. Even now " there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight ; but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." Even now, all that each of us owes to God — -
* R. W. Dale. • Browniug, Rabbi Ben JSzra.
ROMANS XIV. 12 423
what graces He has given to us, what dangers and sufferings He has spared us — He knows, and as yet He alone knows. But when we come to give in our account, we shall know too. A flood of light will be poured from His throne across the whole course of our lives, and into every crevice of our souls and characters.
^ From the outside standpoint judgment is the result of conduct : from the inner standpoint it is the result of character. Conduct is character unfolding itself ; and character is the way a man thinks. From the one standpoint judgment is the fruit of men's deeds; from the other it is the fruit of their thoughts. Isaiah puts the same message thus : " Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him ; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked ! it shall be ill with him : for the reward of his hands shall be given him." Jeremiah's statement is the same, only carried a little deeper to its source. Our destiny is the fruit of our doings and the reward of our hands ; and our doing is the fruit of our thoughts. The common feature of both messages is that judgment is not something superimposed on life, a sentence arbitrarily passed on a man. Punishment is not retribution exacted from a man by a superior power outside him ; it is the necessary and inevitable consequence flowing from the condition. When will we learn that judgment is not arbitrary or incidental or capricious ? It is self-registering, automatic, the harvest of our life. Conduct is the outgrowth of character ; and character conditions destiny. The wages of being good is not some recompense added on like a perquisite to a salary. Its highest wages is goodness itself. The recompense of being holy is holiness ; the reward of being pure is purity. The punishment of sin is itself, its own loathly, deadly self. The harvest of the flesh is itself, corruption. The penalty of a depraved mind is depravity. The retribution of an impure heart is impurity. Who will deliver us from the body of this death ? ^
2. Whatever God's verdict upon us may be, our consciences will have to affirm its justice. We shall see ourselves by His light, as He sees us, as we have never seen ourselves before. We shall know as never before what He meant us to be, what we might have been, what we are. All the illusions of our present life, all the fabrics of self-satisfaction built up by the kind words of friends or by the insincerities of flatterers, all the atmosphere of twilight which here encompasses our spiritual state, will have
' Hugh Black.
424 OUR ACCOUNTABILITY
rolled away ; we Bhall stand out in the light before the Eternal Judge and before ourselves, and we shall be ready to make full confession.