(2) It should make him concentrate. — He who knows he is in the world for a very little while, who knows it and feels it, is not like a man who is to live here for ever. He strikes for the centre of living. He cares for the principles and not for the
1 E. T. Cook, The Life of Buskin i. 122.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 217
forms of life. He does the little daily things of life, but he does them for their purposes, not for themselves. He is like a climber on a rocky pathway, who sets his foot upon each projecting point of stone, but who treads on each, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the ones above it. The man who knows he is to die to-morrow does all the acts of to-day, but does them as if he did not do them, does them freely, cannot be a slave to their details, has entered already into something of the large liberty of death. That is the way in which the sense that life is short liberates a man from the slavery of details. You say, perhaps, "That is not good. No man can do his work well unless his heart is in it." But is it not also true that a man's heart can really be only in the heart of his work, and that the most conscientious faithful- ness in details will always belong, not to the man who serves the details, but to the man who serves the idea of the work which he has to do ?
Tf Michael Faraday, when a poor apprentice, utilized every moment, and in a letter to a boy friend he wrote : " Time is all I require. Oh, that I could purchase at a cheap rate some of our modern gents' spare hours — nay, days ! I think it would be a good bargain both for them and for me." l
0 gentlemen! the time of life is short; To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial's point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour.2
(3) It should make him realize. — Every emotion has its higher and its lower forms. It means but little to me if I know only that a man is happy or unhappy, if I do not know of what sort his joy or sorrow is. But all the emotions are certainly tempted to larger action if it is realized that the world in which they take their birth is but for a little time, that its fashion passes away, that the circumstances of an experience are very transitory. That must drive me down into the very essence of every experi- ence and make me realize it in the profoundest and largest way. Take, for instance, one experience. Think of deep sorrow coming to a man, something which breaks his home and heart by taking suddenly, or slowly, out of them that which is the centre of
1 G. C. Lorimer, Messages of To-day, 355. * Shakespeare, Henry IV., pt. I. v. ii. 82.
218 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
them both, some life around which all his life has lived. There are two forms in which the sorrow of that death comes to a man. One is in the change of circumstances, the breaking up of sweet companionships and pleasant habits, the loneliness and weariness of living ; the other is in the solemn brooding of mystery over the soul and the tumult of love within the soul, the mystery of death, the distress of love. Now if the man who is bereaved sees nothing in the distance, as he looks forward, but one stretch of living, if he realizes most how long life is, it is the first of these aspects of his sorrow that is the most real to him. He multiplies the circumstances of his bereavement into all these coming years. Year after year, year after year, he is to live alone. But if, as it so often happens when death comes very near to us, life seems a very little thing; if, as we stand and watch when the spirit has gone away from earth to heaven, the years of earth which we have yet to live seem very few and short ; if it seems but a very little time before we shall go too, then our grief is exalted to its largest form. It grows unselfish. It is perfectly consistent with a triumphant thankfulness for the dear soul that has entered into rest and glory. It dwells not on the circumstances of bereavement, but upon that mysteri- ous strain in which love has been stretched from this world to the other, and, amid all the pain that the tension brings, is still aware of joy at the new knowledge of its own capacities which has been given it.
If A truth is not true until it is realized. I know that a battle was fought and won ; the mother whose only son appears in the list of the dead realizes it. A man is saved not by what he holds, but by what holds him. I believe in God. So did Antipas. So do you. Who would contradict this ? We are all theists. We all believe in God. And yet any man who realized the awfully solemn and truly blessed meaning of this would live as in a temple. This world is the temple of God. And though somewhere and somehow we are in the thrice holy place we are never beyond its outer courts.1