a name for myself, to win wealth.  Let me bend all my efforts in a fierce determination—­made the fiercer because of the thought of the brevity of life—­to win the end.’  The mere contemplation of the shortness of our days may be an ally of immorality, of selfishness, of meanness, of earthly ambitions, or it may lay a cooling hand on fevered brows, and lessen the pulsations of hearts that throb for earth.

But whilst it is not wholesome to be always thinking of death, it is more unwholesome still never to let the contemplation of that end come into our calculations of the future, and to shape our lives in an obstinate blindness to what is the one certain fact which rises up through the whirling mists of the unknown future, like some black cliff from the clouds that wreath around it.  Is it not strange that the surest thing is the thing that we forget most of all?  It sometimes seems to me as if the sky rained down opiates upon people, as if all mankind were in a conspiracy of lunacy, because they, with one accord, ignore the most prominent and forget the only certain fact about their future; and in all their calculations do not’ so number their days’ as to ‘apply’ their ‘hearts unto wisdom.’  ‘Go thou thy way until the end,’ and let thy way be marked out with a constant eye towards the end.

II.  Note, again, the resting-place.

‘Go thou thy way, for thou shalt rest.’  Now, I suppose, to most careful readers that clearly is intended as a gracious, and what they call a euphemistic way of speaking about death.  ‘Thou shalt rest’; well, that is a thought that takes away a great deal of the grimness and the terror with which men generally invest the close.  It is a thought, of course, the force of which is very different in different stages and conditions of life.  To you young people, eager, perhaps ambitious, full of the consciousness of inward power, happy, and, in all human probability, with the greater portion of your lives before you in which to do what you desire, the thought of ‘rest’ comes with a very faint appeal.  And yet I do not suppose that there is any one of us who has not some burden that is hard to carry, or who has not learned what weariness means.

But to us older people, who have tasted disappointments, who have known the pressure of grinding toil for a great many years, whose hearts have been gnawed by harassments and anxieties of different kinds, whose lives are apparently drawing nearer their end than the present moment is to their beginning, the thought, ‘Thou shalt rest,’ comes with a very different appeal from that which it makes to these others.

    ’There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
     And I have had trouble enough for one,’

says our great modern poet; and therein he echoes the deepest thoughts of most of this congregation.  That rest is the cessation of toil, but the continuance of activity—­the cessation of toil, and anxiety, and harassment, and care, and so the darkness is made beautiful when we think that God draws the curtain, as a careful mother does in her child’s chamber, that the light may not disturb the slumberer.