I HOPE, if you have been to the sea, you may have been so fortunate as to have found a place such as I know, where there are two beaches, one rocky and rough, with beautiful clear pools among the rocks, full of bright seaweeds, and little crabs; and the other, on the opposite side of the bay, as different from the rocky beach as possible: just one broad reach of sand, where the tiny waves come creeping up so silently, that you can hardly believe this is the same sea which Faithful Words for Old and Young 8 (1879) breaks with such a roar and dash not so very far away.
I fancy, if you had to choose, you would rather have the sandy beach after all: for know how you enjoy building houses and making gardens in the sand.
I will tell you of the most beautiful sand house and garden I ever saw. A great many children had joined to build it, and they were very sensible children, too; at least the elder boys and girls who planned it must have been, for they got the little ones to carry their buckets full of sand right away from the place where the tide came in every day, to a sheltered spot under the sea wall, and there high and dry, they made their model mansion, A very grand place it was, I assure you; nothing was carelessly done, the garden paths were straight and well pressed down, and the beds were cut out almost as cleanly as a gardener would have done them. The little ones grew hot and tired as they ran backwards and forwards with their buckets, but still the work went on; and at last, to crown it all, some beautiful roses and pinks were stuck into the garden beds, and the children clapped their hands with delight.
“It seems a pity,” said a gentleman who had been watching them at work, “that all their labor should be in vain.”
“Oh, I daresay their pretty work will last a long time,” replied the lady to whom he had spoken, “you see what a good place they have chosen, quite out of the way of the tide; of course the flowers must wither, but I hope the house and garden will be here for many a day.”
“It is spring tide tomorrow, and I think the waves will come quite up to this wall,” said the old gentleman. “I fear they will be bitterly disappointed when they find no trace of their handiwork remaining. However,” he added, as they turned to go home, “it is a lesson we must all learn sooner or later.”
If the children had overheard the conversation, I daresay they would have had very different thoughts about it. Many of them would have felt vexed with the old gentleman for even thinking it possible that their beautiful house should be swept away, and would have said, “I don’t believe it a bit.” The elder ones might have remembered with some anxiety that they had never thought of the spring tide, and some perhaps would have noticed the words, “It is a lesson we must all learn sooner or later,” and wondered what they meant. Well, the spring tide came, and the waves rose higher and higher, until at last they came washing up against the seawall, and the bright flowers of the blooming garden which surrounded the house built of sand, were soon floating far out to sea on the crest of the returning wave. When next I passed that way the place where the house had been was not to be found.
The old gentleman’s words about the house had come true. But what of his other words about the lesson we must all learn? Ah! I think he meant we must learn to build our hopes not on the uncertain things of this life, which are as bright for a moment as the flowers in the sand garden, and as soon withered and swept away; but upon what is sure and unfading. I think you understand me. None of you are so young that you have not known many a disappointment; pleasures, to which you have looked forward with eager delight, have seemed not worth having when they really came, and some of you have known worse trials than these.
Now that we are speaking of these things, you begin to think of that house of which our Lord spoke to His disciples, built by the foolish man, without a foundation upon tie sand, and of the great fall or that house when the storm beat upon it. The children of God in all times, though living in a world or change and sorrow, where the resistless tides of death are ever rising, have looked for a City which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God; they have had a sure hope which can never make the heart sick as the failing hopes of this life do.
But we do not of ourselves think much of these things, we are like the children of whom a traveler in India wrote long ago— “I beheld,” he says, “children writing their lessons with their fingers on the ground, the pavement being for that purpose strewed with very fine sand. When the pavement was full, they put the writing out, and if need were, strewed new sand before them, wherewith to write farther.”
Let me tell you of the way which a British queen once took to try to make the king, her husband, think of a life to come, and not build upon the sands of this world. In those days, when even kings removed from one part of the country to another, they took with them all their furniture and household goods.
One day king Ini had already started on a journey, when queen Ethelburg, who was riding beside him, besought him as a favor to turn his horse, and ride back again with her to the house they had left the day before.
When they came to the old hall where the king had so lately feasted with his brave men, they found all desolate and empty, save that pigs and cattle were feeding there. As the king looked upon the scene, Ethelburg turned to him and said, “After this manner the glory and pleasant things of this world pass away; so that I hold him foolish who cleaves to the things of this world, and takes no thought of the life everlasting.”
Let us ask God to teach us, too, that the fashion of this world passes away, so that we may build our hopes for this present time, as well as for the great future, on His sure foundation, even the Lord Jesus Christ; “he that believeth in Him shall not be confounded.”
N. N.