The old, old comparison of life to a journey is very natural and very
pathetic. It expresses life's ceaseless change; every day carries us
into a new scene, every day the bends of the road shut out some happy
valley where we fain would have rested, every day brings new faces, new
associations, new difficulties, and even if the same recur, yet it is
with such changes that they are substantially new, and of each day's
march it is true, even when life is most monotonous, that 'ye have not
passed this way heretofore.' It expresses life's ceaseless effort and
constant plodding. To-day's march does not secure to-morrow's rest,
but, however footsore and weary, we have to move on, like some child
dragged along by a careless nurse. It expresses the awful crumbling
away of life beneath us. The road has an end, and each step takes us
nearer to it. The numbers that face us on the milestones slowly and
surely decrease; we pass the last and on we go, tramp, tramp, and we
cannot stop till we reach the narrow chamber, cold and dark, where, at
any rate, we have got the long march over.
But to many men, the journey of life is one which has no definite
direction deliberately chosen, which has no all-inclusive aim, which
has no steady progress. There may be much running hither and thither,
but it is as aimless as the marchings of a fly upon a window, as busy
and yet as uncertain as that of the ants who bustle about on an
ant-hill.
Now that is the idea, which our text implies, of all the activity of a
godless life, that it is not a steady advance to a chosen goal, but a
rushing up and down in a trackless desert, with many immense exertions
all thrown away. Then, in contrast, it puts this great thought: that
God has come to us and made for us a path for our feet.
II. The highway that God casts up.
Of course that coming we take to be Christ's coming, and we have just
to consider the manner in which His coming fulfils this great promise,
and has made in the trackless wilderness a way for us to walk in.
1. Christ gives us a Definite Aim for Life. I know, of course, that men
may have this apart from Him, definite enough in all conscience. But
such aims are unworthy of men's whole capacities. Not one of them is
fit to be made the exclusive, all-embracing purpose of a life, and,
taken together, they are so multifarious that in their diversity they
come to be equal to none. How many we have all had! Most of us are like
men who zig-zag about, chasing after butterflies! Nor are any such aims
certain to be reached during life, and they all are certain to be lost
at death.
Godless men are enticed on like some dumb creature lured to
slaughter-house by a bunch of fodder--once inside, down comes the
pole-axe.
But Christ gives us a definite aim which is worthy of a man, which
includes all others; which binds this life and the next into one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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