“If the tree fall toward
the south or toward the north, in the
place where the tree falleth there it shall be. - Eccles. xi:
3.
There is a hovering hope in the minds
of a vast multitude that there will be an opportunity
in the next world to correct the mistakes of this;
that, if we do make complete shipwreck of our earthly
life, it will be on a shore up which we may walk to
a palace; that, as a defendant may lose his case in
the Circuit Court, and carry it up to the Supreme
Court or Court of Chancery and get a reversal of judgment
in his behalf, all the costs being thrown over on the
other party, so, if we fail in the earthly trial,
we may in the higher jurisdiction of eternity have
the judgment of the lower court set aside, all the
costs remitted, and we may be victorious defendants
forever.
My object in this sermon is to show
that common sense, as well as my text, declares that
such an expectation is chimerical. You say that
the impenitent man, having got into the next world
and seeing the disaster, will, as a result of that
disaster, turn, the pain the cause of his reformation.
But you can find ten thousand instances in this world
of men who have done wrong and distress overtook them
suddenly. Did the distress heal them? No;
they went right on.
That man was flung of dissipations.
“You must stop drinking,” said the doctor,
“and quit the fast life you are leading, or it
will destroy you.”. The patient suffers
paroxysm after paroxysm; but, under skillful medical
treatment, he begins to sit up, begins to walk about
the room, begins to go to business. And, lo! he
goes back to the same grog-shops for his morning dram,
and his even dram, and the drams between. Flat
down again! Same doctor. Same physical anguish.
Same medical warning.
Now, the illness is more protracted;
the liver is more stubborn, the stomach more irritable,
and the digestive organs are more rebellious.
But after awhile he is out again, goes back to the
same dram-shops, and goes the same round of sacrilege
against his physical health.
He sees that his downward course is
ruining his household, that his life is a perpetual
perjury against his marriage vow, that that broken-hearted
woman is so unlike the roseate young wife that he
married, that her old schoolmates do not recognize
her; that his sons are to be taunted for a life-time
by the father’s drunkenness, that the daughters
are to pass into life under the scarification of a
disreputable ancestor. He is drinking up their
happiness, their prospects for this life, and, perhaps,
for the life to come. Sometimes an appreciation
of what he is doing comes upon him. His nervous
system is all a tangle. From crown of head to
sole of foot he is one aching, rasping, crucifying,
damning torture. Where is he? In hell on
earth. Does it reform him?
After awhile he has delirium tremens,
with a whole jungle of hissing reptiles let out on
his pillow, and his screams horrify the neighbors
as he dashes out of his bed, crying: “Take
these things off me!” As he sits, pale and convalescent,
the doctor says: “Now I want to have a
plain talk with you, my dear fellow. The next
attack of this kind you will have you will be beyond
all medical skill, and you will die.” He
gets better and goes forth into the same round again.
This time medicine takes no effect. Consultation
of physicians agree in saying there is no hope.
Death ends the scene.
That process of inebriation, warning,
and dissolution is going on within stone’s throw
of this church, going on in all the neighborhoods
of Christendom. Pain does not correct. Suffering
does not reform. What is true in one sense is
true in all senses, and will forever be so, and yet
men are expecting in the next world purgatorial rejuvenation.
Take up the printed reports of the prisons of the United
States, and you will find that the vast majority of
the incarcerated have been there before, some of them
four, five, six times. With a million illustrations
all working the other way in this world, people are
expecting that distress in the next state will be salvatory.
You can not imagine any worse torture in any other
world than that which some men have suffered here,
and without any salutary consequence.
Furthermore, the prospect of a reformation
in the next world is more improbable than a reformation
here. In this world the life started with innocence
of infancy. In the case supposed the other life
will open with all the accumulated bad habits of many
years upon him. Surely, it is easier to build
a strong ship out of new timber than out of an old
hulk that has been ground up in the breakers.
If with innocence to start with in this life a man
does not become godly, what prospect is there that
in the next world, starting with sin, there would
be a seraph evoluted? Surely the sculptor has
more prospect of making a fine statue out of a block
of pure white Parian marble than out of an old black
rock seamed and cracked with the storms of a half
century. Surely upon a clean, white sheet of paper
it is easier to write a deed or a will than upon a
sheet of paper all scribbled and blotted and torn
from top to bottom. Yet men seem to think that,
though the life that began here comparatively perfect
turned out badly, the next life will succeed, though
it starts with a dead failure.
“But,” says some one,
“I think we ought to have a chance in the next
life, because this life is so short it allows only
small opportunity. We hardly have time to turn
around between cradle and tomb, the wood of the one
almost touching the marble of the other.”
But do you know what made the ancient deluge a necessity?
It was the longevity of the antediluvians. They
were worse in the second century of their life-time
than in the first hundred years, and still worse in
the third century, and still worse all the way on
to seven, eight, and nine hundred years, and the earth
had to be washed, and scrubbed, and soaked, and anchored,
clear out of sight for more than a month before it
could be made fit for decent people to live in.
Longevity never cures impenitency. All the pictures
of Time represent him with a scythe to cut, but I
never saw any picture of Time with a case of medicines
to heal. Seneca says that Nero for the first five
years of his public life was set up for an example
of clemency and kindness, but his path all the way
descended until at sixty-eight he became a suicide.
If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any
better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity
could have no effect except prolongation of depravity.
“But,” says some one,
“in the future state evil surroundings will be
withdrawn and elevated influences substituted, and
hence expurgation, and sublimation, and glorification.”
But the righteous, all their sins forgiven, have passed
on into a beatific state, and consequently the unsaved
will be left alone. It can not be expected that
Doctor Duff, who exhausted himself in teaching Hindoos
the way to heaven, and Doctor Abeel, who gave his
life in the evangelization of China, and Adoniram
Judson, who toiled for the redemption of Bornéo, should
be sent down by some celestial missionary society
to educate those who wasted all their earthly existence.
Evangelistic and missionary efforts are ended.
The entire kingdom of the morally bankrupt by themselves,
where are the salvatory influences to come from?
Can one speckled and bad apple in a barrel of diseased
apples turn the other apples good? Can those
who are themselves down help others up? Can those
who have themselves failed in the business of the soul
pay the debts of their spiritual insolvents?
Can a million wrongs make one right?
Poneropolis was a city where King
Philip of Thracia put all the bad people of his
kingdom. If any man had opened a primary school
at Poneropolis I do not think the parents from other
cities would have sent their children there.
Instead of amendment in the other world, all the associations,
now that the good are evolved, will be degenerating
and down. You would not want to send a man to
a cholera or yellow fever hospital for his health;
and the great lazaretto of the next world, containing
the diseased and plague-struck, will be a poor place
for moral recovery. If the surroundings in this
world were crowded of temptation, the surroundings
of the next world, after the righteous have passed
up and on, will be a thousand per cent. more crowded
of temptation.
The Count of Chateaubriand made his
little son sleep at night at the top of a castle turret,
where the winds howled and where specters were said
to haunt the place; and while the mother and sisters
almost died with fright, the son tells us that the
process gave him nerves that could not tremble and
a courage that never faltered. But I don’t
think that towers of darkness and the spectral world
swept by Sirocco and Euroclydon will ever fit one
for the land of eternal sunshine. I wonder what
is the curriculum of that college of Inferno, where,
after proper preparation by the sins of this life,
the candidate enters, passing on from freshman class
of depravity to sophomore of abandonment, and from
sophomore to junior, and from junior to senior, and
day of graduation comes, and with diploma signed by
Satan, the president, and other professorial demoniacs,
attesting that the candidate has been long enough
under their drill, he passes up to enter heaven!
Pandemonium a preparative course for heavenly admission!
Ah, my friends, Satan and his cohorts have fitted uncounted
multitudes for ruin, but never fitted one soul for
happiness.
Furthermore, it would not be safe
for this world if men had another chance in the next.
If it had been announced that, however wickedly a
man might act in this world, he could fix it up all
right in the next, society would be terribly demoralized,
and the human race demolished in a few years.
The fear that, if we are bad and unforgiven here, it
will not be well for us in the next existence, is the
chief influence that keeps civilization from rushing
back to semi-barbarism, and semi-barbarism from rushing
into midnight savagery, and midnight savagery from
extinction; for it is the astringent impression of
all nations, Christian and heathen, that there is
no future chance for those who have wasted this.
Multitudes of men who are kept within
bounds would say, “Go to, now! Let me get
all out of this life there is in it. Come, gluttony,
and inebriation, and uncleanness, and revenge, and
all sensualities, and wait upon me! My life may
be somewhat shortened in this world by dissoluteness,
but that will only make heavenly indulgence on a larger
scale the sooner possible. I will overtake the
saints at last, and will enter the Heavenly Temple
only a little later than those who behaved themselves
here. I will on my way to heaven take a little
wider excursion than those who were on earth pious,
and I shall go to heaven via Gehenna and via
Sheol.” Another chance in the next world
means free license and wild abandonment in this.
Suppose you were a party in an important
case at law, and you knew from consultation with judges
and attorneys that it would be tried twice, and the
first trial would be of little importance, but that
the second would decide everything; for which trial
would you make the most preparation, for which retain
the ablest attorneys, for which be most anxious about
the attendance of witnesses? You would put all
the stress upon the second trial, all the anxiety,
all the expenditure, saying, “The first is nothing,
the last is everything.” Give the race
assurance of a second and more important trial in the
subsequent life, and all the preparation for eternity
would be post-mortem, post-funeral, post-sepulchral,
and the world with one jerk be pitched off into impiety
and godlessness.
Furthermore, let me ask why a chance
should be given in the next world if we have refused
innumerable chances in this? Suppose you give
a banquet, and you invite a vast number of friends,
but one man declines to come, or treats your invitation
with indifference. You in the course of twenty
years give twenty banquets, and the same man is invited
to them all, and treats them all in the same obnoxious
way. After awhile you remove to another house,
larger and better, and you again invite your friends,
but send no invitation to the man who declined or
neglected the other invitations. Are you to blame?
Has he a right to expect to be invited after all the
indignities he has done you? God in this world
has invited us all to the banquet of His grace.
He invited us by His Providence and His Spirit three
hundred and sixty-five days of every year since we
knew our right hand from our left. If we declined
it every time, or treated the invitation with indifference,
and gave twenty or forty or fifty years of indignity
on our part toward the Banqueter, and at last He spreads
the banquet in a more luxurious and kingly place,
amid the heavenly gardens, have we a right to expect
Him to invite us again, and have we a right to blame
Him if He does not invite us?
If twelve gates of salvation stood
open twenty years or fifty years for our admission,
and at the end of that time they are closed, can we
complain of it and say, “These gates ought to
be open again. Give us another chance”?
If the steamer is to sail for Hamburg, and we want
to get to Germany by that line, and we read in every
evening and every morning newspaper that it will sail
on a certain day, for two weeks we have that advertisement
before our eyes, and then we go down to the docks
fifteen minutes after it has shoved off into the stream
and say: “Come back. Give me another
chance. It is not fair to treat me in this way.
Swing up to the dock again, and throw out planks, and
let me come on board.” Such behavior would
invite arrest as a madman.
And if, after the Gospel ship has
lain at anchor before our eyes for years and years,
and all the benign voices of earth and heaven have
urged us to get on board, as she might sail away at
any moment, and after awhile she sails without us,
is it common sense to expect her to come back?
You might as well go out on the Highlands at Neversink
and call to the “Aurania” after she has
been three days out, and expect her to return, as
to call back an opportunity for heaven when it once
has sped away. All heaven offered us as a gratuity,
and for a life-time we refuse to take it, and then
rush on the bosses of Jehovah’s buckler demanding
another chance. There ought to be, there can
be, there will be no such thing as posthumous opportunity.
Thus, our common sense agrees with my text “If
the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north,
in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall
be.”
You see that this idea lifts this
world up from an unimportant way-station to a platform
of stupendous issues, and makes all eternity whirl
around this hour. But one trial for which all
the preparation must be made in this world, or never
made at all. That piles up all the emphases and
all the climaxes and all the destinies into life here.
No other chance! Oh, how that augments the value
and the importance of this chance!
Alexander with his army used to surround
a city, and then would lift a great light in token
to the people that, if they surrendered before that
light went out, all would be well; but if once the
light went out, then the battering-rams would swing
against the wall, and demolition and disaster would
follow. Well, all we need do for our present
and everlasting safety is to make surrender to Christ,
the King and Conqueror surrender of our
hearts, surrender of our lives, surrender of everything.
And He keeps a great light burning, light of Gospel
invitation, light kindled with the wood of the cross
and flaming up against the dark night of our sin and
sorrow. Surrender while that great light continues
to burn, for after it goes out there will be no other
opportunity of making peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ. Talk of another chance! Why,
this is a supernal chance!
In the time of Edward the Sixth, at
the battle of Musselburgh, a private soldier, seeing
that the Earl of Huntley had lost his helmet, took
off his own helmet and put it upon the head of the
earl; and the head of the private soldier uncovered,
he was soon slain, while his commander rode safely
out of the battle. But in our case, instead of
a private soldier offering helmet to an earl, it is
a King putting His crown upon an unworthy subject,
the King dying that we might live. Tell it to
all points of the compass. Tell it to night and
day. Tell it to all earth and heaven. Tell
it to all centuries, all ages, all millenniums, that
we have such a magnificent chance in this world that
we need no other chance in the next.
I am in the burnished Judgment Hall
of the Last Day. A great white throne is lifted,
but the Judge has not yet taken it. While we are
waiting for His arrival I hear immortal spirits in
conversation. “What are you waiting here
for?” says a soul that went up from Madagascar
to a soul that ascended from America. The latter
says: “I came from America, where forty
years I heard the Gospel preached, and Bible read,
and from the prayer that I learned in infancy at my
mother’s knee until my last hour I had Gospel
advantage, but, for some reason, I did not make the
Christian choice, and I am here waiting for the Judge
to give me a new trial and another chance.”
“Strange!” says the other; “I had
but one Gospel call in Madagascar, and I accepted it,
and I do not need another chance.”
“Why are you here?” says
one who on earth had feeblest intellect to one who
had great brain, and silvery tongue, and scepters of
influence. The latter responds: “Oh,
I knew more than my fellows. I mastered libraries,
and had learned titles from colleges, and my name
was a synonym for eloquence and power. And yet
I neglected my soul, and I am here waiting for a new
trial.” “Strange,” says the
one of the feeble earthly capacity; “I knew
but little of worldly knowledge, but I knew Christ,
and made Him my partner, and I have no need of another
chance.”
Now the ground trembles with the approaching
chariot. The great folding-doors of the Hall
swing open. “Stand back!” cry the
celestial ushers. “Stand back, and let
the Judge of quick and dead pass through!” He
takes the throne, and, looking over the throng of
nations, He says: “Come to judgment, the
last judgment, the only judgment!” By one flash
from the throne all the history of each one flames
forth to the vision of himself and all others.
“Divide!” says the Judge to the assembly.
“Divide!” echo the walls. “Divide!”
cry the guards angelic.
And now the immortals separate, rushing
this way and that, and after awhile there is a great
aisle between them, and a great vacuum widening and
widening, and the Judge, turning to the throng on one
side, says: “He that is righteous, let him
be righteous still, and he that is holy, let him be
holy still;” and then, turning toward the throng
on the opposite side, He says: “He that
is unjust, let him be unjust still, and he that is
filthy, let him be filthy still;” and then,
lifting one hand toward each group, He declares:
“If the tree fall toward the south or toward
the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there
it shall be.” And then I hear something
jar with a great sound. It is the closing of
the Book of Judgment. The Judge ascends the stairs
behind the throne. The hall of the last assize
is cleared and shut. The high court of eternity
is adjourned forever.