WHAT is the supreme significance of life? Is it a pleasant pastime, or is it a solemn probation, a swiftly passing springtime from whose wise sowing the harvests of time and eternity are to be reaped? There is the human side, the beauty, the joy, the romance, the sunshine and the bloom; but there is the seriousness of life’s conflicts, death’s tragedy, and eternity’s mighty issues. No man can make the most of life until he has looked all these things in the face and learned the highest meaning of the old motto: “Dum vivimus, vivamus.”
“‘Live while you live,’ the epicure would say,
‘And seize the pleasures of the present day.’
‘Live while you live,’ the sacred preacher cries,
‘And give to God each moment as it flies.’
Lord, in our view, let both united be;
We live in pleasure while we live to Thee.”
An old writer compares the worldling to a child sitting on the branches of a fruitful tree, growing over an abyss, and thoughtlessly eating the fruit, while two worms, called Day and Night, were slowly eating through the branch until it suddenly fell and plunged him in the abyss. No man or woman can safely give his supreme attention to earthly things until his eternal interests are assured.
The people that are wasting the springtime of life in thoughtless pleasure may well be compared to the crew of a shipwrecked vessel who were thrown upon a fertile island and only succeeded in saving their cargo of wheat and bringing it ashore. The wise ones suggested that they should plant it in the fertile soil and assure themselves of future supplies, but as they were about to engage in this wise prevision and provision, one of the company returned from an excursion over the hills with the report that he had found a gold mine of inexhaustible wealth. Immediately they all started for the mine and spent the summer in amassing enormous fortunes, meanwhile feeding upon the wheat which they should have planted. Suddenly the winds of autumn began to blow and they awoke with a start to find their food supply well nigh gone. They began eagerly to plant the remaining seed, but it rotted in the furrows and they were left to die of starvation, surrounded by millions and billions of worthless gold.
Dear friend, are you wasting life’s supreme opportunity like them, and some day will you hear the blasts of life’s autumn moaning over your despairing death bed: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved”? No wise man will go to sleep knowing that the insurance on his property has lapsed without immediately renewing it. And no sane mortal will venture to leave his soul without that divine assurance of which he can say: “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.”
A. B. Simpson.