Not ours to finish tasks or seek the sight Of precious increase and the praise of man. But just to scatter seed in nature's night And leave with God the issue of His plan; He will complete what He in Grace began. And order even thine errors all aright. Thou wert well paid, whatever clouds do come. If thou hast helped one wandering sinner Home.*
II.
The Folly of Self-Deception.
•* Be not deceived ; God is not mocked."
The word for "mocked" implies the most unseemly and insulting gesture. When is God thus mocked ? God is mocked when we pretend to be His, while we cut our being in two and give the better half to Satan ; when we draw nigh unto Him with our lips while our hearts are far from Him ; when we say, *' I go, sir," and go not ; when we try to combine the vile pleasure of sin with the perfect allegiance which God requires; when we say " Lord, Lord," and do evil continually.
1. The danger of deception is very real. For one thing the interval between the sowing and the reaping is much longer than in the natural world, and the connexion between them is not 1 F. W. Orde Warde.
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clearly seen. Think of a child that has been foolishly bronght up. No effort is made to train its will to obedience, to instil into its mind a reverence for God, and a love for the high things of the soul. There is a certain pleasure in giving the little one its own way. Thus the evil seeds have been sown. The child becomes a man. Years lie between the sowing and the reaping. Only then may it be that the harvest of pain and shame comes home which brings the grey head with sorrow to the grave. The interval is so long that the connexion between the sorrow and the foolish training is not recognized, and parents wonder why their children are so stubborn, self-willed, and ungrateful. They do not see that they are the victims of their own folly. Twenty years ago they sowed the seeds of which they now reap the bitter harvest. They have deceived themselves, but God is not mocked.
^ Napoleon had the faculty, when he chose, of creating a fool's paradise for himself. In the Eussian campaign he had, for example, ordered his marshals to operate with armies which had ceased to exist. When they remonstrated he simply replied, " Why rob me of my calm ? " When the Allies invaded France he professed to rely greatly on the army of Marshal Macdonald. " Would you like," said the Marshal to Beugnot, " to review my army ? It will not take you long. It consists of myself and my chief of the staff. Our supplies are four straw chairs and a plank table." Again, during the campaign of 1814 the Emperor was detailing his plans to Marmont. Marmont was to do this and that with his corps of ten thousand men. At each repetition of this figure Marmont interrupted to say that he had only three. Yet Napoleon persisted to the end : " Marmont with his ten thousand men." But the strangest instance of this is detailed by Meneval, who tells us that when the Emperor added up numbers of his soldiers he always added them up wrong, and always swelled the total. So at St. Helena he really, we think, brought himself to believe that he would be released when Lord Holland became Prime Minister, or when Princess Charlotte ascended the throne.^
2. Long before we gather into our arms the final harvest, we are receiving according to whaj; we have done, whether it be good or evil. In the end we shall still be as we have been, only in more perfect measure. "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is ' Lord Rosebary, Napoleon : The Last Phase, 113.
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righteous, let him be righteous still : and he that is holy, let him be holy still." Let us not imagine that the principles of moral order will be different in the end from what they were at the beginning — God is always judging us as He will judge us at the last. The end is not yet. The harvest still tarries. The corn- stalk is not matured, nor the full grain shown in the ear. But we are making our future every hour, and with many of us the crop is fast ripening into the eternal day.
Every evil thought or deed has sentence against it speedily executed in the character. One cannot do a mean thing or think a base thought without becoming like the thing he thinks or does. The worm takes on the colour of the leaf upon which it feeds. Every vile thought leaves its trail of slime behind, leaves the mind filthier for even its momentary presence. Every bad act of a man's life makes it easier for him evermore to do the bad. A miser not only scrapes his fingers to the bone in raking together his money, he hardens his heart to the core. " What is put into the strong box," it is truly said, " is taken out of the man." He who cheats, is cheating himself worse than all others. The thief steals from himself ; the liar turns himself into a living lie ; the profligate is his own victim. The man who attempts to injure his neighbour, only succeeds in injuring himself. The wrong that he does his own soul is ten times more severe and lasting than any evil he can inflict on others. " No man," says Burke, " ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him " ; and St. Bernard wrote : " Nothing can work me damage except myself ; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufifereir but by my own fault."