2. No doubt the world itself will pass away. For that we have the warrant of Scripture, and Science has countersigned the warrant. But this warrant is not to be found here. St. Paul is not predicting a future catastrophe ; he is announcing a present fact. He does not affirm that " the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" of this familiar world, yea, the solid globe itself, with all who inherit it, shall dissolve, and like the baseless fabric of a vision, like an insubstantial pageant faded, "leave not a rack behind." He affirms a fact with which we are more immediately concerned, namely, that the fashion, the form, the whole outward aspect, of the world in which we live fades, changes, passes, while we look upon it ; that it is now, and always, passing away : and from this fact he infers the immense importance of fixing our affections and placing our aims, not on the outward show, the frail and shifting forms of things, but on the sacred and enduring realities which lie beneath and behind them. There are two ways in which it is true that the fashion of this world is passing away.
(1) First it is true with respect to all the things by which we are surrounded. — It is only in poetry — the poetry of the Psalms for example — that the hills are called " everlasting." Go to the
1 G. Matheson.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 231
side of the ocean which bounds our country, and watch the tide going out, bearing with it the sand which it has worn from the cliffs; the very boundaries of our land are changing; they are not the same as they were when these words were written. Every day new relationships are forming around us; new cir- cumstances are calling upon us to act, to act manfully, firmly, decisively, and up to the occasion, remembering that an oppor- tunity once gone is gone for ever. Indulge not in vain regrets for the past, in vainer resolves for the future; act, act in the present.
T[ The difference between the ancient and the modern world is this: in the one the great reality of being was now, in the other it is yet to come. If you would witness a scene character- istic of the popular life of old, you must go to the amphitheatre of Rome, mingle with its 80,000 spectators, and watch the eager faces of Senators and people; observe how the masters of the world spend the wealth of conquest, and indulge the pride of power; see every wild creature that God has made, from the jungles of India to the mountains of Wales, from the forests of Germany to the deserts of Nubia, brought hither to be hunted down in artificial groves by thousands in an hour; behold the captives of war, noble perhaps and wise in their own land, turned loose, amid yells of insult more terrible for their foreign tongue, to contend with brutal gladiators trained to make death the favourite amusement, and present the most solemn of individual realities as a wholesale public sport; mark the light look with which the multitude, by uplifted finger, demands that the wounded combatant be slain before their eyes ; notice the troop of Christian martyrs awaiting hand in hand the leap from the tiger's den ; and, when the day's spectacle is over and the blood of two thousand victims stains the ring, follow the giddy crowd as it streams from the vomitories into the street, trace its lazy course into the forum, and hear it there scrambling for the bread of private indolence doled out by the purse of public corruption ; and see how it suns itself to sleep in the open ways, or crawls into foul dens till morning brings the hope of games and merry blood again; — then you have an idea of that Imperial people, with their passionate living for the moment, which the Gospel found in occupation of the world.
And if, on the other hand, you would fix in your thought an image of the popular mind of Christendom, I know not that you could do better than go at sunrise with the throng of toiling men to the hillside where Whitefield or Wesley is
232 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
about to preach. Hear what a great heart of reality is in that hymn which swells upon the morning air — a prophet's strain upon a people's lips ! See the rugged hands of labour, clasped and trembling, wrestling with the Unseen in prayer! Observe the uplifted faces, deep-lined with hardship and with guilt, streaming now with honest tears, and flushed with earnest shame, as the man of God awakes the life within, and tells of Him that bare for us the stripes and cross, and offers the holiest spirit to the humblest lot, and tears away the veil of sense from the glad and awful gates of heaven and hell. Go to these people's homes, and observe the decent tastes, the sense of domestic obligations, the care for childhood, the desire for instruction, the neighbourly kindness, the conscientious self-respect, and say whether the sacred image of duty does not live within those minds ; whether holiness has not taken the place of pleasure in their idea of life : whether for them too the toils of nature are not lightened by some external hope, and their burden carried by some angel of love, and the strife of necessity turned into the service of God. The present tyrannizes over their character no more, subdued by a future infinitely great; and hardly though they lie upon the rock of this world, they can live the life of faith ; and while the hand plies the tools of earth, keep a spirit open to the skies.1