United States or Cameroon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What transiency, what waste and oblivion like that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves! Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact that certain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass, and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men as well as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet.
The characteristic quality of the visible and material world which is set forth by the expression here employed is its transiency. 'The children of this epoch' rather than 'of this world' is the meaning of the phrase.
To see, with such emphatic regularity, one's coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after summer!.... Perhaps it is nobler, this deliberate viewing of oneself as part of the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the flow and transiency become apparent and poignant. In five minutes fifty years of America, of so much of America, go past one.
And the certain transiency of all creatural objects is a good reason for not fastening ourselves to them, lest we should share their fate. 'Gilgal shall go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought, therefore let us join ourselves to the Eternal Love and we shall abide, as it abides, for ever. The exhortation is next enforced by presenting the consequences of neglecting it.
Nor was Matthew less right in seeing in that earlier deliverance but a germinant accomplishment of the prophecy, which, by its very transiency, outwardness, and incompleteness, pointed onwards to a better spring of the Light, and a fuller deliverance from a murkier darkness and a more mortal death.
'Behold the hour cometh that ye shall be scattered' as He had told them a little while before in the upper room, like a flock when the shepherd is stricken down 'every man to his own. He does not reject their imperfect homage, though He discerns so clearly its imperfection and its transiency, but sadly warns them to beware of the fleeting nature of their present emotion; and would seek to prepare them, by the knowledge, for the terrible storm that is going to break upon them.
"So," says Deborah, after the fierce description of the slaughter of Sisera 'So let all Thine enemies perish, O Lord! but let them that love Thee be as the sun when he shineth in his strength. She contrasts the transiency of the lives that pit themselves against God with the perpetuity that belongs to those which are in harmony with Him.
They who only take into account the transiency of life are made sad, or sometimes desperate, by the unwelcome thought. But they whose pilgrimage is a journey home may look that transiency full in the face, and be as glad because of it as colonists on their voyage to the old country which they call 'home, though they were born on the other side of the world and have never seen its green fields.
Love is tortured by its own intensity; and the thought of death strikes through the experience which means the life of the race. As her lips felt Marsham's kiss, she knew, as generations of women have known before her, that life could give her no more; and she also knew that it was transiency and parting that made it so intolerably sweet. "Till death us do part," she said to herself.
This watchfulness is an indispensable part of our 'work. The true Christian thought of the transiency of the world sets us to work the more vigorously in it, and increases, not diminishes, our sense of the importance of time and of earthly things, and braces us to our tasks by the thought of the brevity of opportunity, as well as by guarding us against tastes and habits which eat all earnestness out of the soul.
Word Of The Day