“Earth’s but a sorry tent,
      Pitched but a few frail days;”

and the chances and changes of this mortal life often bear heavily upon us.  But there these things have no place.  Moth and rust, change and decay, sorrow and death cannot enter there.

    “The day’s aye fair
      I’ the land o’ the leal.”

Again, Christ said, “I go to prepare a place for you.”  Just as when a little child is born into the world it comes to a place made ready for it by the thousand little tendernesses of a mother’s love, so does death lead us, not into the bleak, inhospitable night, but into the “Father’s house,” to a place which love has made ready for our coming.  “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” Into Thy hands—­thither Jesus passed from the Cross and the cruel hands of men; thither have passed the lost ones of our love; thither, too, we in our turn shall pass.  Why, then, if we believe in Jesus should we be afraid?  “Having death for my friend,” says an unknown Greek writer, “I tremble not at shadows.”  Having Jesus for our friend we tremble not at death.

Further, Christ taught us, the heavenly life is a life of service.  Every one knows how largely the idea of rest has entered into our common conceptions of the future.  It is indeed a pathetic commentary on the weariness and restlessness of life that with so many rest should almost have come to be a synonym for blessedness.  But rest is far from being the final word of Scripture concerning the life to come.  Surely life, with its thousandfold activities, is not meant as a preparation for a Paradise of inaction.  What can be the meaning and purpose of the life which we are called to pass through here, if our hereafter is to be but one prolonged act of adoration?  We shall carry with us into the future not character only but capacity; and can it be that God will lay aside as useless there that which with so great pains He has sought to perfect here?  It is not so that Christ has taught us to think:  “He that received the five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliverest unto me five talents:  lo, I have gained other five talents.  His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant:  thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will set thee over many things:  enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”  God will not take the tools out of the workman’s hands just when he has learned how to handle them; He will not “pension off” His servants just when they are best able to serve Him.  The reward of work well done is more work; faithfulness in few things brings lordship over many.  Have we not here a ray of light on the mystery of unfinished lives?  We do not murmur when the old and tired are gathered to their rest; but when little children die, when youth falls in life’s morning, when the strong man is cut off in his strength, we know not what to say.  But do not “His servants serve Him” there as well as here?  Their work is not done; in ways beyond our thoughts it is going forward still. [60]