IV. Life. "What is your life? It is even a vapour."-JAMES iv. 14. AWA HAT is your life?" Every kind of creature in God's world has its own life. From Him, the All, of whom and through whom and to whom are all things, there is a continuous influx of that mysterious boundless force which when organized constitutes Life. Upwards through an infinite series of existences, from the mollusc to man, there is a certain something—what we cannot say—which is the cause of energy or action, the absence of which is death, the presence of which is life. Verily an exhaustless fulness and a boundless variety. What strange, diversified forms of being are and have been! Some gone, leaving only a fragment of the structure to speak of what was. Not very long ago, within a few miles of Glasgow, there was found in a coal And bed the tooth of a huge creature, a sort of mammoth, telling of species for centuries extinct; species before the period which is called the glacial period. you know that there is the life of the herb, of the plant, of the flower, of unsentient as well as sentient objects; that everywhere there is this teeming power, this measureless affluence of life. To study its many types, and all that is peculiar to each type, is a work which calls forth the highest faculties of the mind, and which, when rightly engaged in, touches thought and feeling with the emotion of adoring praise. But "what is your life?" In the midst of this earth-fulness, what is to be said, my readers, about you and me? Well, one might answer sorrowfully, if not scornfully, the less said the better. Men in all times have been struck with the shortness and unfinishedness, the uncertainty and the unsatisfactory character of their life. You find images and figures bringing this out in all poetry and literature. A Greek proverb describes man "as a bubble.” They that live longest," says a Greek writer, "are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and, being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into darkness and froth." And another exclaims, "Man is only the dream of the shadow of smoke." We cannot be surprised at this way of speaking. Do we not all feel that there is a part of the truth in it ? Who of us is not conscious of the feeling that he has been wanting in steadiness of purpose; that he has been driven too much hither and thither, and has made but little progress? When we reflect on it, our life seems like a patchwork-bits, shreds, sewed into each other, with little unity of aim and character. We begin, and do not finish; we take up this, and turn to that. We weave and weave, and, as with the web of the old fable, what we weave is unravelled and taken down, and needs to be woven again. And the time is so short-“ our days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle; a sore fight, a continual worry; and what does it all come to ? You see how St. James puts it: a vapour, something that has no distinct body. A mere appearance-not a cloud, not even the matter of a shower," an appearance for a little, and then it vanisheth away." It is in the same line of thought that Matthew Arnold writes in one of his poems : "Hither and thither spins The wind-borne, mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole; Looks once and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ." This is depressing, is it not? But then our own hearts tell us that there must be some balancing and completing truth. It is very true that man does not require the universe to fall on him and crush him a mere drop of a cloud can do this; but then, as it has finely been said, “even in dying we are greater than the universe, because we know that we are dying." If there is in us that soul, some thoughts concerning which I traced in a previous paper, that inner self whose possibilities of growth it is impossible to measure; if there is a special relation between this self and Almighty God; if to redeem this self the Son of God gave Himself for us men and our salvation, then there must be another side to the picture, another view of the meaning and worth of life. A vapour, we cry; but does not mist or vapour witness for a Power above that can draw what is of the earth upwards, heavenwards? Yes, vain, unfixed, almost unreal as this life of ours often seems, let us be sure that there is that above us which is lifting it towards Itself; which is breathing on our minds the confidence which rings out in the old prophet cry, " Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? we shall not die." Let us turn to the second of the words which I have placed at the head of this paper. A part of the "writing of Hezekiah, king of Judah," in which he describes his feeling on recovery from sickness, and in the knowledge that he had received a new lease, a fifteen years' longer tenure of life. It goes back on what was present to his mind when the clammy hand of death seemed to be laid on him. "Oh!" he protests, "to be cut off when busy with plans and works for the good of my people; not to see the deliverance completed which I have begun; never more to hear the human voice or behold the human face; to have the web I have so carefully woven cut in two. Oh!"- -as it were the harsh scream of the crane when it prepares to set forth on its lonely migration,-" oh! this being of mine is in the hand of One who is minded to break and make an end of me!" Now, the hand of death removed, what is the tone? He has heard the voice of God. He knows who is dealing with him. He understands that there is a communion with the Eternal Love and Truth which cannot be broken. Henceforth, his years, his fifteen years, shall be a soft, sweet, solemn march towards the Blessed Presence, this its guiding principle, that by the things a man has in God a man truly lives; that wholly in these things, in what he receives from and finds in the word, will, love of God, is the life of his spirit. Shall we take this then as our landing-place? Your life is saved from being a mere vapour; is made, no |