Chapter 10

Some years ago a young man went out, full of hope and energy, to take charge of a mission which we had planted among the Southern seas. He could not tell when he left our shores whether his life was to be long or short, whether it would be rough or smooth; but he went forth trusting in his God, and he went forth to die. He reached his diocese in safety, and for some years Bishop Patteson, for it was he, preached the gospel, and baptised, and planted missions among those wild people, for whom he had given up his English home. But at length one day the bishop went to an island where the people did not know him, and where at the time they happened to be angry with white men. And so when the good bishop came ashore, they pressed round him, and he soon saw that all was not right. At length one, bolder than the rest, drew near and knocked the bishop down with his club, and then the others closed round him, and so he died. "And they put the young martyr bishop in an open boat," says one, "to float away across the bright blue water, with his hands crossed as if in prayer, and a palm branch on his breast."

That life was not a long one, but who will dare to tell us that it was not a useful life, and a glorious death. It may not be given to you to win the martyr's crown, or to die for Jesus Christ. But it is given to you to live for Christ; and remember there is a living death, a killing of self, which you may do, a death of which St. Paul speaks, when he says, "I die daily[#]."

[#] 1 Cor. xv. 31.

For, after all, what think you was life given to us for? Was it to amuse ourselves, or to enjoy ourselves in? Was it not rather to do good to others, and to work for Jesus Christ? Surely the best lives, and the noblest lives, and the happiest lives are those spent in the service of others. And the Master has told us that He will reward such: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me[#]." And who are Christ's brethren? In every cottage home, in the lonely hut, wherever man is found, whether he be rich or poor, king or beggar, nay the worst specimens of humanity, the murderer and the drunkard, these all are the brethren of Jesus. It is for these He has bid us work, and toil, and pray. It is for these He has commanded us to live and, if need be, to die.

[#] S. Matt xxv. 40.

And no life is too short for this kind of work. The youngest child can do something in the Master's vineyard. It may be only given us to speak a kind word to a companion. But very often a kind word, spoken in the nick of time, has saved a soul from condemnation. Live your life here, then, as Jesus lived His, Who went about doing good; Who sat at meat with the Pharisee and the sinner alike; and Who even allowed a sinful woman to approach Him, and did not turn her away.

*THE DEATH OF FRIENDS.*

"Whene'er the Christian's eyelid droops and closes In nature's parting strife, A friendly angel stands where he reposes, To wake him up to life.

The mourners throng the way, and from the steeple The funeral bell tolls slow; But in the golden streets the holy people Are passing to and fro;

And saying as they meet, 'Rejoice! another, Long waited for, is come;' The Saviour's heart is glad, a younger brother Hath reached the Father's home!" _J. D. Burns._

There is nothing so sad as parting. There comes over the heart such a feeling of utter loneliness that we know not where to turn for relief. It may be the mother who has lost her darling child, and sits counting the weary hours, and missing its baby prattle. It may be the wife of the sailor who sits alone in her cottage with the cruel letter in her lap, which tells of how her husband sank, and died. Or it may be the severing of heart and heart; the parting of two friends who have lived together, and loved each other with a friendship stronger than death. But in whatever way it comes, it is ever the same; the same bitter feeling of loneliness, casting its shadow over the life.

And there is but one way that I know of in which we can get rid of this feeling of loneliness; only one Person to Whom we can apply for relief with any certainty of success. The Man of sorrows, Who could weep tears of human sorrow at the grave of Lazarus, and speak words of sympathy to that troubled multitude who stood around his grave; He alone can sympathise with us in our bereavement, and comfort us in the death of our friends.

The Bible is full of beautiful passages on this important subject. Who, for instance, can read those beautiful words in the seventh chapter of the Revelation, and not receive comfort? "I beheld, and lo! a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said unto me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."

Reader, if any of your relations or friends have gone before you to Paradise, if they have died in God's holy faith and fear, and if, after reading such beautiful words concerning their heavenly state as those above quoted, you still wish them back on earth, then your heart must indeed be of the earth, earthy. Oh, think for one moment of the troubles and trials of this present life, and then turn your thoughts to the state of the blessed dead. No more sickness or sorrow for them; no more care, no more trial; no more sleepless nights or anxious days, for they are as the angels of God. "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may _rest from their labours_[#]."

[#] Rev. xiv. 13.

There are times in the life of every man, when God comes specially near to him; when He says as it were to the soul of man, "Look unto Me, _I_ am thy salvation[#]." One of such times is when we are standing by the death-bed of our loved ones. It may be we have given them the love which rightly belonged to God, and so He has seen fit to take them. Or it may be that we have loved them too little, and lightly valued them here, and so to teach us the value of friends, God has taken them to live with Him above. It may seem to you and to me a hard method of dealing with the human soul, but remember that the dealings of Almighty God are clothed with mystery, "and His ways past finding out[#]."

[#] Ps. xxxv. 3.

[#] Rom. xi. 33.

Lastly, there is one thought more, which may give comfort to those who are mourning the loss of their dear ones. The day will come when we shall meet them again, on "the far eternal shore." But if we would meet them there we must live as they lived; we must serve Christ as they served Him; and love God as they loved Him. And then He will bring us together again on the ever-lasting morning, "when the day breaks and the shadows flee away[#]." "When we are to leave this present state," says Alford, "is a matter hidden from our eyes, and not dependent on ourselves; but how we will leave it, whether as the Lord's blessed ones, or with no part in Him, this is left for ourselves to determine. There is set before us life and death. May we choose life, that it may be well with us, and that we may wake from the bed of death to find ourselves for ever with the Lord."

[#] Cant. ii. 17.

"Therefore let us be of good cheer concerning them that have fallen asleep in Jesus; and let us be of good cheer concerning ourselves. Good as it is to obey and serve God here, it has been far better for them to depart, and to be with Christ, and it will be far better for us, if we hold fast our faith and our confidence in Him firm unto the end."

*THE FEAR OF DEATH.*

"There is no death! the stars go down, To rise upon some fairer shore; And bright in Heaven's jewelled crown, They shine for evermore.

There is no death! an angel form Walks o'er the earth with silent tread, And bears our best loved things away, And then we call them dead." _Lord Lytton._

I have spoken in the earlier part of this book on the general subject of death; I now want to add a few words on that which so many, even of the best of us, feel, the fear of death.

I suppose there have been times in the lives even of the best and bravest men when this fear rose up before them. Times when the dark valley looked darker than usual, and life seemed sweeter than it really was. It is but human to fear what we can in no way understand, and certainly none of us can understand death. His is a message which comes to all alike; to rich and to poor, to young and to old; the soldier on the battle-field, who lays down his life for his country; the sailor, who sinks into a watery grave, and whom the dark wave covers; the missionary, who dies for his Master's sake; to these and many more the angel of death comes, and, whether they are ready or no, they have to yield to his bidding. But of this we may be sure, that God never takes any one away from this world until his work is done. We all of us have some special work to do, either good or evil, and until that work is done we shall be kept from danger and from death. The right way then to look upon death is as the gate that leads us to a better world, the pathway leading to Christ. And the prayer of our heart should be this--

"Let me be with Thee where Thou art, Where spotless saints Thy Name adore; Then only will this sinful heart Be evil and defiled no more.

Let me be with Thee where Thou art, Where none can die, where none remove; Where neither life nor death can part Me from Thy Presence and Thy Love."

And if that is the feeling that you have with regard to the life to come, death can have no terrors for you. "The sting of death is _sin_," but Jesus died long ago to wash your sins away. If then you are free from sin, that is from wilful sin, you will have but little fear of death. It is Satan who gives us this fear; it is Christ who takes the fear away.

But in order not to fear death, we must be prepared for it. If a man _really_ loves God he is prepared to die anywhere and at any moment, and so he does not fear death. "Unto the godly," says David, "there ariseth up a light in the darkness." And so we may say now that to the Christian there ariseth up a light greater and brighter than any David knew of in the darkness of death, even that light which came "to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of His people Israel."

I came across a story the other day of a courtier who had passed his life in the service of his prince. He had fallen dangerously ill, and now lay dying. The prince went to see his faithful servant, and was touched with the sad spectacle of suffering. "Is there anything," he asked, "that I can do for you? Ask it, and you shall not be refused." "Prince," said the dying man, "give me a quarter of an hour of life." "Alas," said the prince, "what you have asked is not in my power to give; ask something else if you wish me to help you." And the story runs that the dying man cried out in the agony of his soul, "I have served you for fifty years, and you cannot give me one quarter of an hour of life! Ah! if I had served the Lord thus faithfully, he would have given me not a quarter of an hour of life, but an eternity of happiness." Very soon after he died. Happy for him if he himself profited by the lesson which he gave to others on the nothingness of human life, and the need of working out one's own salvation.

Reader, the day perhaps will come when you too will wish to ask for a quarter of an hour's life. It may be you will rise to-morrow morning, and God's sun will be shining bright, and everything will look peaceful and happy as you leave home, but the angel of death may have started on his errand; and instead of your walking in, gaily whistling, in the evening when your work is over, there may come down the village a mournful company bearing a wounded man upon a hurdle. That man may be yourself; and as you reach your own door the films of death may be gathering over your eyes, and the one request you would like to make would be, "Oh! that I might have but a quarter of an hour to make my peace with God." It has been the prayer, ere now, of many a one more hardened in sin than yourself. The richest men have felt the longing, and they would have given half of all their hard-earned gold to get that quarter of an hour. The poorest men have felt it too; and if they could begin life again they felt that they would live very differently, and Christ and not Satan should be Master of their hearts.

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God[#]." It is a fearful thing to live a life of wickedness, and to die with unforgiven sin upon the soul. But the remedy is in your own hands. The Lord Jesus waits to be gracious; He loves you, He toils for you, He weeps for you, as He wept for Jerusalem of old, and all He asks of you is to give Him your heart now, and then there will be no such thing as fear in death; for the perfect love wherewith He will teach you to love Him, will cast out all fear and all terror, and in your case there will be no pain in death, but the spirit will pass away from earth to meet Him at last on the shore of heaven.

[#] Heb. x. 31.

*SORROW AND SUFFERING.*

"'Nobody knows but Jesus!' Is it not better so, That no one else but Jesus, My own dear Lord, should know?

When the sorrow is a secret Between my Lord and me, I learn the fuller measure Of His quick sympathy." _F. R. Havergal._

"Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward[#]" is a very true saying. And I suppose there will be few people, if any, of those who read this book, who will not know something about sorrow. Yes, we all feel sorrow, more or less. Some people feel it more acutely than others. To some it is a real burthen. From the little child who cries over its broken toy to the old man who weeps over his lost wealth, all are partakers of sorrow.

[#] Job v. 7.

Suffering, again, might be "sorrow's own sister," so closely are the two connected here below. For instance, God sends a great and crushing sorrow; say, for instance, the death of a dear friend, or the sickness of one we love; and to us the news of this sorrow brings intense pain, deep suffering. And you may ask, why is this suffering necessary? You tell us it is sent by God, and that all He sends is for our good, what is the need of suffering? I will tell you. A friend of mine who had been in Eastern lands, told me he once saw a shepherd who wanted his flock to cross a stream. The shepherd went into the water himself and called them, but no, they would not follow him into the water. What did he do? Why, he went in among the flock, and lifting a little lamb under each arm, plunged right into the stream, and crossed it without even looking back. When he lifted the lambs, my friend said, the old sheep looked up into his face, and began to bleat for them; but when he plunged into the water, the dams plunged in after him, and then the whole flock followed. When they reached the other side he put down the lambs, and they were quickly joined by their mothers, and there was a happy meeting. My friend told me, too, that he noticed that the pastures on the other side of the stream were much better, and the fields greener, and on this account the shepherd was leading them across. And in like manner does the good Shepherd, even Jesus Christ, having found his oft-repeated call to men to look up to heaven vain, so also does He often take from His flock a little lamb, and crossing with it the stream of death, places it down amid the green pastures and still waters of Paradise. And by this means he often causes the parents to look up to the same place, for right well He knows the truth of His own words, that "Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also.[#]"

[#] Matt. vi. 21.

And so, perhaps, you begin to see that suffering used by Almighty God has its uses. It very often is the means, in cases where other means have failed, of weaning a soul away from earth, and fixing its hopes on the things of heaven. It very often is the first warning given to the soul of man, that here has he no continuing city, but must seek one to come. Reader, it may be as you have walked along life's troubled way, you have as yet had but little taste of suffering. But it will come one day. It comes to us all; and very often, the best men, and the holiest men are the greatest sufferers, under the chastening hand of God. You remember the case of Job in the Bible, what a sufferer he was! And yet Job was a good man; for when the temptation came to him to curse God and die, he recognised it as the voice of Satan, even though the words were spoken by the one nearest to him on earth.

The great thing for us all to recognise in the day of suffering and the time of sorrow alike, is the good hand of our God upon us. To understand that there is such a thing as being "perfect through suffering," and that we, even as the Master Himself did, may learn obedience by the things which we suffer. That a smooth existence without sorrow and without suffering may be a life of mental anguish, while a life of sorrow and suffering may be a life of joy, of hope, and of triumph, are doubtless lessons hard to learn; but for all that we must needs learn them. And if we cannot learn this lesson from the lives of those around us, it may be God's good pleasure to teach it in our own.

*DEATH.*

"There is a Reaper whose name is Death, And with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between." _Longfellow._

So solemn a subject is that of death, and so near have many of us been brought to it, either in our own homes or in those of others, that we cannot but approach it with a feeling of awe. To the worldly man death can never be a pleasant prospect. At best it means to him the cessation of all hope and of all action. All worldly pleasure is then at an end, and for him there remains no such rest as is the hope and stay of the people of God.

Another class there is that looks upon death in another way. These do not really enjoy life here below, still less do they enjoy any hope of life to come. For such persons death is but a leap in the dark; a bridge across the dark valley from the mists of earth into a far more misty future; a passage from the darkness here into the deeper and blacker darkness beyond.

But how different all this is in the case of the Christian man. He has been preparing, all his life through, for the world to come. His conversation--his "citizenship--is in Heaven[#];" and in death he recognises the method by which his dear Lord calls him home. There is no sting, no agony, in the Christian's death; Jesus, his Saviour, took that away long ago. There have been death-beds, on which men lay with bodies racked with aching pains, or horribly mutilated, and yet the look on their faces was perfectly happy. The body indeed was suffering agony, but the mind was feasting on visions of a far-off land. and a kindly Saviour ready to receive the redeemed one home. Oh, yes, there is something grand and striking about the Christian's death. The invisible spirits of God ascending and descending, as of old they did to the sleeping Jacob at Bethel, keep bringing stores of comfort to his soul.

[#] Phil. iii. 20.

Among the many grand and noble deaths which history records, I know of none grander in its simplicity or more precious in its lessons, than that of Commodore Goodenough in our own day. He had gone ashore with a boat's crew, on one of the South Sea Islands; when he was surrounded, and attacked by the natives, who were exasperated at the cursed man-stealing trade which has brought discredit on the English name. The Commodore was wounded by an arrow, which chanced to be poisoned; but this he did not know. Nor was it till his ship was nearing Adelaide, that he discovered that his wound was mortal. And then beneath the open sky, far from his English home, on the deck of his vessel in which he had sailed over those summer seas, he called his men around him; and as the rough seamen, one after another, gathered quickly round their dying chief, he looked upon them, with the films of death already settling on his glazing eyes, and said, "My men, I want you to serve God." These were the last words he ever spoke to them, and then his spirit passed away to join the vast multitude before the throne of that God he had loved and served so well.

The death of a Christian is indeed precious from the lessons we learn from it. But in order to die a Christian's death, remember you must live a Christian's life, and then you may say with Balaam--"Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his[#]."

[#] Num. xxiii. 10.

*LAST WORDS.*

"On what has now been sown Thy blessing, Lord, bestow; The power is Thine alone To make it spring and grow." _Newton._

We have now reached the last chapter of these readings, and the last words must be spoken.

We have thought together upon life and death; upon humility and self-denial, those "two graces peculiarly Christian." I have spoken of our duties to our parents and to our children respectively; of work of various kinds on earth, and of rest in our Father's kingdom. And now, reader, that it is almost time for us to part, let us "gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost[#]."

[#] S. John vi. 12.

Have you learnt anything, do you think, that you didn't know before, from the words of this book? Are you any nearer to your Father's house than you were when first you opened it? Has the Bible seemed in any degree more precious to you, or has it in any way increased your regard for the things of the Spirit, and the peace that passeth understanding? If these, or any of them, have been attained, I have gained my object. If this book has in any way put before you the old, old story in a new light, then my purpose has been accomplished, my work is done. But if there is any one who rises from reading this book, feeling still careless about God, or holiness; if there be any who, like Felix of old, intends to put off repentance to a more convenient season, which season may never come, let me earnestly beg of him in these last words to repent, ere it is too late.

The present time is yours--the future is God's. And remember that you must give up sin _entirely_ if you would be a follower of Christ. Don't rest content, as I well know too many do, with being no worse than others. Don't go with the multitude to do evil. Christ wants you to try and be better than others, and not as good or bad as they.