How strong is the conviction, spoken :'.n this name for death, that the essential life lasts on quite unaltered through it all ! How slight the else formidable thing is made ! We may change climates, and for the stormy bleakness of life may have the long still days of heaven, but we do not change ourselves. We lose nothing worth keeping when we leave behind the body, as a dress not fitted for home, where we are going. We but travel one more stage, though it be the last, and part of it be in pitchy darkness. Some pass over it as in a fiery chariot, like St. Paul and many a martyr. Some have to toil through it with slow steps and bleeding feet and fainting heart ; but all may have a Brother with them, and, holding His hand, may find that the journey is not so hard as they feared, and the home from which they shall remove no more better than they hoped when they hoped the most.
^ In my schooldays I often put my head under the blankets and sobbed bitterly because I thought that death would some day come and snatch my father from me. Life to me then — so I dreamed — could only speak disaster, for I thought of Death as a foe who dealt out devastating blows. But the thoughts and dreams of boyhood were false. Death came not as a foe, but as a friend ; and his mystic message was Life. We said, not, " God's finger touched him and he slept," but, " and he lives." For that is what his passing taught us. In the days of his flesh this eager and active soul had a way of standing before you in unlikely spots and in unexpected moments. This is just what he still does, for after his soul had flown out through the window of his bedroom it came in through the front door. He had kept his biggest surprise to the end.^
^ Love and Life: The Story of J. Denholm Brash, by his Son, 204.
2 TIMOTHY IV. 6-8 233
^ To the aged, the world beyond is no strange place. Its door has opened so often to admit now one, now another of their friends that the passage has grown familiar to them. Professor Jowett, writing to Lady (then Mrs.) Tennyson to suggest, as a subject for the Laureate's muse, old age, quotes the words of an old lady to himself : " The spirits of my children always seem to hover about me ! " Tennyson, his son tells us, had heard the saying before, and it was the germ of his poem, " The Grand- mother." It will be remembered how the aged heroine of that poem, hearing of the death of her eldest-born, stays her tears with the reflection, " What time have I to be vext ? — . . . how can I weep for Willy, he has but gone for an hour. Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next ; I too shall go in a minute."^
11.
St. Paul's Past Achievement.
" I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith."
Surprise has been expressed in some quarters that St. Paul should write of himself in what seems to be a self-righteous and boastful strain; and some textual critics have seized on this passage as furnishing some sort of suggestion or proof that this letter is not genuine, but that it was written by some admirer of St. Paul's in the second century. Well, even if there were this self-congratulatory note we must remember that we have here a man who is always writing about himself (he is the most sublime egoist in_the New Testament), because he is to himself the most ' amazing example of what the grace and power of God can do ; also, that the letter is to a dear personal friend, and not a letter to a church, which would naturally become public property. This is probably a letter which the writer never dreamt would be preserved or seen by anybody but Timothy, to whom he is accus- tomed to pour out his most intimate thoughts, and to whom in a previous letter he has described himself as the chief of sinners. But when we come to look into the words, all that seems self- righteous is not there. St. Paul is not saying, " I have been a 1 P. W. Eoose, The Book of The F<uture Life, 125.
234 THE CROWN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
good man." He is not even saying, " I have made a good fight of it." The Eevisers have properly put in the definite article, and have thus rather shifted the centre of thought from the Apostle to the nature of life he has lived and the ministry he has fulfilled ; which, mark you, is the life and ministry he wants Timothy to fulfil. The situation is most natural. There is the old warrior, laying aside his weapons, putting off his armour, going to his reward. Here is the younger man, needing a heartening and bracing word. And this is the word that comes to him from one who would pass on the leadership, if possible, to his hands.
1. " I have fought the good fight," says the Apostle. He is speaking in the language of the Olympian Games, and is referring to the athletic contests of the arena. " I have fought the good fight." The term ought not to surprise us. We are continually talking of the struggle for existence, of the fight for position, the battle of life. And when we come to the highest life that man can live, the life of mastery of sin and of the world, it ought not to surprise us that it can fittingly be described only under the term fight.