X. INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. AND THE LORD SAID UNTO HIM, THIS IS THE LAND WHICH I SWEAR UNTO A S we move onward in the journey of human life, there are many reminders by the way of the coming end. The sickness that lays us up for a while in the midst of our vigorous days, the decline of each setting sun, the death of summer verdure and the autumnal fall of the leaves, the lapse of the year, the passing of each of our life's four seasons, the dropping from our side of the companions of our way, each of these is intended, and usually serves, to turn our thoughts forward to the final arrest of our steps, the mortal sickness one day to seize us, the going down of our last earthly sun, the winter of our year. There is nothing unkind in sending us such reminders. We need them. And they are given in faithfulness and mercy. And one of the impressions most vividly produced upon us at such seasons is of the disappointing incompleteness of our life on earth. The fever comes in the midst of our plans and toils, the closing day reproaches us for many a brave purpose of the morning unfulfilled, and the waning year cuts short the schemes which we had hoped to see rounded with full success. This impression is probably present on every heart as we stand here together on this shore of the last Sabbath of the year and see its months, like waves broken and spent, all behind us. How much that we meant to have effected before we were called to stand by the pillow of the dying year is still unachieved! What good that we hoped to have attained to is yet in the future! What dear desire eagerly followed is yet unpossessed! And as it is to-day, so it will be at the last. Each human life, longer or shorter, wherever it pauses, and however it be protracted, will be visited at its close with the sense of disappointment and incompleteness. If Moses had been told, when he led out the tribes from Egypt, that he should never lead them into the promised land; that he should march at their head forty years in the wilderness, but should never cross the Jordan with them; that he should come in sight of their goodly inheritance, but should never set foot in it, never taste of the milk and honey, never sit under the shadow of its fruitful vines, it would have been so sad and depressing a sentence that faith and resignation could hardly have struggled against it. There was always before his eye and his hope the vision of that great triumph when he should stand at the head of a redeemed nation on those sacred hills of promise, and be permitted to lift up with his own hand the banner of the holy people higher than all the ensigns of earthly royalty. But it was never to be. He was to come near it, but short of it. It was to be almost within grasp, but not touched. One only narrow stream of all that had separated him from this prize still flowed between; across it and far beyond he could see with his eyes, but he was never to go over with his feet. There he stood on the very border, the gate ready to open, the goal before him, when God said. to him tenderly, but firmly, "Come up into this mountain and die!" It was a trying word to Moses, and for one moment he plead against it. "O Lord God, thou hast begun to show thy servant thy greatness and thy mighty hand. I pray thee, let me go over, and see the good land that is beyond Jordan, that goodly mountain and Lebanon!" And then came the final word, fatherly but sovereign also, "Let it suffice thee; speak no more unto me of this matter." There followed indeed the glorious compensative vision from that salient summit of the Moab range, but the work and the hope of a life seemed to miss of their crown. Touching illustration of that incompleteness attending every human career in this world, upon which we may briefly meditate as we are held awhile in the grasp of this old year so near its end. There is more than one sense, to be sure, in which the briefest and most fragmentary life may be considered filled out to utmost completeness. As to God's providential purpose in it, it is as long and as productive as it was meant to be. Just as it is, it fits accurately into the ever-developing divine plan; no more and no less was expected from it. It is complete as a link between the generations of men and the stages of human progress. It takes the living torch from the hand of its predecessor and passes it over to the hand of its successor. Then its function is ended, and it may cease to be. It is often complete in the balance of its own proportioned seasons. It sports in the sunny hours of childhood. It drinks in the fervid inspiration of youth. It shares the consciousness of manhood's strength. It wears the white and honorable crown of age. It is a full life year. It has had a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter, treading the full round of all the circling months. There is sometimes, too, whatever the heart has longed for, not yet attained, there is sometimes, let us thank God, a full-orbed sense of satisfaction with our work and the length of our working day. A dying patriot and statesman could say as he faltered in the midst of the toil which, gray-haired and bowed with years, he still maintained, "This is the last of earth; I am content." And another gray-haired laborer on whom the hand of power was laid with despotic violence could write it as his peaceful testimony, "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." Still how much that this same heroic veteran had hoped to secure of the victories of the truth must have rested upon his mind as visions, upon whose fulfilment he might look down from another world, but was never to see in this! This incompleteness will come into clearer recognition if we consider how little a human life accomplishes in comparison with the plans of God. Those divine plans are large. They reach from age to age, from generation to generation, "from everlasting to everlasting." They cover the beginning, the progress, the final periods of all human history. They take up, employ, and dismiss successive workers, while yet some miner detail only is wrought out, and the vast integral scheme is scarcely at all set forward. A single task may fill and weary the hands of one laborer and another and another before it is concluded, and in its completion seem only a trivial contribution to the general progress. Measured by the colossal, slow-moving system of God's providence, the turning of this vast wheel that rolls on the designs of the all-wise Mind, a wheel so high, so broad, that, though always moving, its motion, like the growth of the seasons or the procession of the constellations, is imperceptible to our eye, - how brief, how fragmentary, how evanescent is the little life and work of man! God will call him out of the families of earth a peculiar people. Who shall have the founding and building of this elect nation? How much shall any one chosen instrument accomplish in the piling of this slow-rising architecture? Abraham hears the voice of God on the plain of Mamre, and moves out to begin the work. He dies, and Isaac's hand catches the slackened thread of progress. Jacob goes over Jordan with his staff only, and comes back a double band. Joseph disappears beneath the dark portal of an Egyptian prison, and reappears in the second chariot of royalty. The babe of the Nile turns his back on the court, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the peo |