Compare, then, if you will, this life of yours or mine, not with the personal standard of threescore years and ten, but with the whole course of human history; and instantly we appear but as bubbles in the stream of ages.But, again, consider how history itself is as "a tale that is told;" and then, indeed, what a mere incident in it all is your life and mine! If we stand off at the distance of a few centuries, so that we have no present interest in them, it is strange how the proudest empires assume an empty and spectral aspect.
Their growth and decline occupied ages; but what a brief achievement it appears now! Why puzzle ourselves about their origin, or seek to disengage the true from the fabulous in their history? Why strain laboriously to settle names, and dates, and dynasties? What mere point they have occupied in the processes of the great universe! Their hieroglyphic pillars, their gray old pyramids;--what are they to the age of Uranus, or the new planet? Each of these empires fulfilled its mission, and relatively that mission was a great one; but in the long sweep of God's providence, and among the phenomena of absolute being, what a brief link, a subordinate climax, it was! The huge ribs of the earth, and the coral islands of the sea were longer in building; and even these are transitory manifestations of God's purposes, which stream around us through constant change and succession.And what, then, are these nations-these epochs of humanity-but waves rising and breaking on the great sea of eternity? Mysterious Egypt, haughty Assyria, glorious Greece, kingly Rome;--how spectral they have become.They stand out in no relief.As we recede from them, they sink back, flat and inanimate on the horizon.Each is a tale that has been told.Surely, then, if such is the life of nations, I need not labor to impress upon you a sense of the brevity of our individual existence.
But, for a moment, turn your thoughts to estimates that far exceed the periods of history, and confound all our ordinary measurements.What is our mortal existence, into which we crowd so much interest,--over the anticipated length of which we slumber,--into whose uncertain future we project our lithe plans so confidently,--compared to the age of the heavens,--the lifetime of worlds?--compared to their march, from the moment when they obeyed the creative fiat to that when they shall complete their great cycle? It takes three years for light to travel from the nearest fixed star to the earth;from another it takes twelve years; while, on its journey from a star of the twelfth magnitude, twenty four billions of miles away, it consumes four thousand years.And yet we speak of long life! Why, when the light that wraps us now shall be changed for the light that is just leaping from that distant star, where in the gray bosom of the past shall we be? Sunken, forgotten, crumbled to imperceptible atoms; the ashes of generations-the dust of empires-heaped over us! And when we compare those wide estimates to that divine eternity that evolves and limits all things, how does our individual existence on the earth dwindle and vanish!--a heart-throb in the pulses of the universal life,--a quivering leaf in the forest of being,--"a tale that is told"!
And yet, my friends, our realization of existence is so intense,--the horizon of the present shuts us in so completely,--that it really requires an effort for us to pause and remember that we are such transitory beings.It cannot be (we may unconsciously reason), that we to whom this earth is bound with ligaments so intimate and strong; whose breathing and motion-whose contact and action here-are such realities; whose ears hear these varying sounds of life;whose eyes drink in this perpetual and changing beauty; to whom business, study, friendship, pleasure, domestic relations, are such fresh and constant facts; to whom the dawn and the twilight, the nightly slumber and the daily meal, are such regular experiences; to whom our possessions, our houses, lands, goods, money, are such substantial things;--it cannot be that we are not fixed permanently here,--that the years like a swift river, sweep us nearer and nearer to a point where we must sink and leave it all,--that the corridors of the earth echo our footsteps only as the footsteps of a successive march-myriads going before, and myriads coming after us-and soon they will catch no more murmurs of our individual life; for that will be as "a tale that is told."The whole train of thought I am now pursuing strikes us with peculiar force, in reading the biographies of men who have lived intensely, who have realized the fulness of life, who have mingled intimately with its varied experiences, and occupied a large place in it.We see how to them life was, as it is to us, an absorbing fact,--how they have planned, and thought, and acted, as though they were to live forever;and yet we have noticed the premonitions of change, the dropping away of friends, the failing of vigor, the deepening of melancholy shadows, and the coming of the end; the business closed, the active curiosity and intermeddling ceased, the familiar haunts abandoned, the home made desolate, the lights put out, the cup fallen beneath the festal board, and all the earnest existence stopped forever.
And this, too, so quick,--filling so small a space in absolute time! From their illustration let us, then, realize that our life, too, amid all these real conditions, is unfolding rapidly to an end, and is "as a tale that is told."But life is like a tale that is told, because of its comprehensiveness.It is a common characteristic of a narrative that it contains a great deal in a small compass.
It includes many years, and expresses many results.
