T[ There is a little insect that crawls upon the trees, and creeps, in one short day of ours, through all the experiences of life from birth to death. In a short twenty-four hours his life begins, matures and ends — birth, youth, activity, age, decrepitude, all crowded and compressed into these moments that slip away uncounted in one day of our human life. Is his life long or short ? Is our life long or short to him ? If he could realize it by any struggle of his insect brain, what an eternity our three- score years and ten must seem to him ! And then lift up your eyes, lift up your thoughts, and think of God. How does the life that has any limits appear to Him ? Nothing short of eternity can seem long to Him. He sees the infant's life flash like a ripple into the sunlight of existence and vanish almost before the eye has caught it. And He sees Methuselah's slow existence creep through its nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and find, at last, the grave which had stood waiting so long. Is there a real
1 W. M. Sinclair, A Young Mans Life, 126.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 213
difference in the length of these two lives to Him ? A little longer ripple is the life of the patriarch than was the life of the baby, that is all. What do we mean, then, by the shortness of our human life ? To the ephemera it looks like an eternity ; to God it looks like an instant. Evidently these attributes of length and shortness must be relative ; they are not absolute.1
^ An illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, " God works in moments " — " En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments that signify. Let the measure of Time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance — what ample borrowers of eternity they are ! 2
(2) Again, time is short with reference to its opportunities. — For this is the emphatic meaning in the original — literally, " the opportunity is compressed, or shut in." Time may be long, and yet the opportunity may be very short. The sun in autumn may be bright and clear, but the seed which has not been sown until then will not vegetate. A man may have vigour and energy in manhood and maturity, but the work which ought to have been done in childhood and youth cannot be done in old age. A chance once gone in this world can never be recovered.
•[J An Italian superstition of the Middle Ages engaged with wonderful success the pencil of Watts while he was sojourning in Florence, and in it he who had been the pupil of Phidias in the study of the Elgin marbles at home, became the worshipper of Tintoretto in Italy. The Fata Morgana which Boiardo in his Orlando Innamorato imagined as a siren, fleeing from the pur- suit of a knight, he embodies with a singular deftness. She is depicted as having reached a thicket of dense foliage, and the knight has almost grasped the hem of her crimson robe when she flees still further from him with a mischievous glance which mocks all his eager efforts. It was a superstitious notion among the Italian peasants that this mystic being could only be effectu- ally caught by having the lock of her forehead seized with a firm grasp. What is this but virtually saying in finer form, what time, and every opportunity which it brings, is preaching to us in loud tones — to seize it by the forelock and hold it fast, other- wise it will escape and we shall lose it for ever ? s
K Iron passes into the furnace cold and unyielding ; coming
1 Phillips Brooks. 2 Emerson.
8 H. Macmillan, The Life- Work of George Frederick Watts, 171,
2i4 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
out it quickly cools and refuses the mould; but midway is a moment when fire so lends itself to iron, and iron so yields its force to flame that the metal flows like water. This brief plastic moment is the inventor's opportunity, when the metal will take on any shape for use or beauty. Similarly the fields offer a strategic time to the husbandman. In February the soil refuses the plough, the sun refuses heat, the sky refuses rain, the seed refuses growth. In May comes an opportune time when all forces conspire towards harvests; then the sun lends warmth, the clouds lend rain, the air lends ardour, the soil lends juices. Then must the sower go forth and sow, for nature whispers that if he neglects June he will starve in January. The planets also lend interpretation to this principle. Years ago astronomers were sent to Africa to witness the transit of Venus. Preparations began months beforehand. A ship was fitted up, instruments were packed, the ocean was crossed, a site selected, and the telescopes were mounted. Scientists made all things ready for that opportune time when the sun, Venus, and the earth should all be in line. That critical moment was very brief. Instinctively each astronomer knew that his eye must be at the small end of the glass when the planet went scudding past the large end. Once the period of conjunction had passed no machinery would offer itself for turning the planet back upon her axis. Not for astronomers only are the opportune times brief.1