^ Frightful to all men is Death ; from of old named King of Terrors. Our little compact home of an Existence, where we dwelt complaining, yet as in a home, is passing, in dark agonies, into an Unknown of Separation, Foreignness, unconditioned Possibility. The Heathen Emperor asks of his soul : Into what places art thou now departing ? The Catholic King must answer : To the Judgment-bar of the Most High God ! Yes, it is a summing-up of Life ; a final settling, and giving-in the " account of the deeds done in the body " ; they are done now ; and lie there unalterable, and do bear their fruits, long as Eternity shall last.^
For none a ransom can be paid, , A suretyship be made :
I, bent by mine own burden, must Enter my house of dust;
I, rated to the full amount, Must render mine account.
When earth and sea shall empty all Their graves of great and small ;
When earth wrapt in a fiery flood Shall no more hide her blood;
When mysteries shall be revealed; All secrets be unsealed ;
When things of night, when things of shame. Shall find at last a name,
Pealed for a hissing and a curse Throughout the universe:
'Carlyle, Freiich Revolution, i. 17.
430 OUR ACCOUNTABILITY
Then Awful Judge, most Awful God, Then cause to bud Thy rod,
To bloom with blossoms, and to give Almonds; yea, bid us live.
; I plead Thyself with Thee, I plead
Thee in our utter need:
Jesus, most Merciful of Men, Show mercy on us then;
Lord God of Mercy and of men, Show mercy on us then.^
2. *' To God." We are not under a rigid law. We are under personal authority, acting in harmony with eternal principles of law ; and we have to meet a personal judgment, whose decision will be determined by the eternal principles of law. But this is the supreme thing, that only a living person who knows us altogether can appreciate the true conditions under which our moral life has been lived, the heights we ought to have reached, and the grounds on which we may be forgiven for not having reached heights which were easily accessible to others. We have to give account, each one of himself, to God ; and it is this con- ception of the relations between man and God, and this alone, which relieves human life of its awful gloom and confusion, and contains the promise of a Divine order. For to God some of the noblest forms of moral life may be found where to our eyes there is the least dignity and grace. You were born under felicitous circumstances; but to reach the virtue which you attained without effort, another man may have to exert incessant energy. His dearly bought excellence, though inferior to that which you have easily achieved, is to God infinitely nobler and more precious than the goodness which you, without effort, have accomplished. Each man has to " give account of himself to God." ,
^ One man is placed under conditions — conditions not of his own choice, conditions to which he was destined — which make it impossible for him to do very much beyond getting the rough ore of goodness out of the black and gloomy mine. He has got it with the sweat of his brow, with pain, with peril. To him God
^ Ckristiiia G. Rossetti.
ROxMANS XIV. 12 431
will say, " Well done ! " Another man has the ore at his feet to start with. It is not enough for him to bring that to God. For him there is a different task. In the fires of self-discipline he has to liberate the ore from its dross, and to produce the pure metal. It is enough that one man should bring the rough ore to God; this man must bring pure metal extracted from it. And a third has the metal to begin with. He fails, and fails disastrously unless he works it up into forms of noble usefulness and gi-acious beauty. Each man will have to "give account of himself to God," and only God can judge of the worth of each man's work, because only God knows the conditions under which each man's work is being carried on.^
Not on the vulgar mass
Called " work," must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand.
The low world laid its hand. Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All pui'poses unsure. That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act. Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.^
* R. W. Dale. • Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra,
A Definition of the Kingdom.
ROMANS — 2&
Literature.
Dykes (J. 0.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 171
Fraser (J.), University Sermons, 183.
Hughes (H. P.), The Philanthropy of God, 259.
Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 194.
Parker (J.), The City Temple (1870), 445.
Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, xi. 177.