| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 1 |
Page 4 |
We think once more, and we find that life has another attachment – forward to the bar of God. We must render account for all the deeds done in the body. We read more deeply into the divine revelation, and learn that this accountability extends to all the minutest acts and words and thoughts that drop from hand and lip and heart as we move along. It even reaches to the unconscious influences that breathe out from us like the fragrance of a flower. We must meet our whole life again before God’s throne, and give account not only for what we have done, evil and good, but also for all that we ought to have done – for the undeveloped possibilities of our lives and their unimproved opportunities.
It is in the light of such facts as these that we must regard the life that is given to each of us. It is indeed a sacred burden. It is no light and easy thing so to live as to fulfill the end for which we were made and redeemed. Life is no mere play. Every moment of it is intensely real and charged with eternal responsibility. It is when we look at life in this way that we see our need of Christ. Apart from him there can be only failure and ruin. But if we give ourselves to him, he takes up our poor perishing fragment of being, cleanses it, puts his own life into it, and nurtures it for a glorious immortality.
Under a plain marble monument sleeps the dust of one of God’s dearest children,* who gave her life to his cause in unwearying service till its last power was exhausted. Cut in the stone that marks her last resting place is this memorable sentence from her own lips, which tells the secret of her consecration: “There is nothing in the universe that I fear except that I may not know all my duty, or may fail to do it.” With such a sense of personal responsibility pressing upon the heart at every moment, life cannot fail to be beautiful and well rounded here, and to pass to a coronation of glory hereafter.
*Mary Lyon, founder of Mount Holyoke Seminary. She used to give to the girls in her graduating classes this motto also: “My dear girls when you choose your fields of labor go where nobody else is willing to go.”
Page 4
<< Prior Page 1 2 3 4 Next Page >>