The phraseology of the text is exquisitely beautiful. Notice the smoothness of its rhythm, the simplicity of its style, the harmony of its cadences: "_Man that is born of woman, is of few days, and full of trouble._" This is the direct opposite of what all naturally desire. All living human beings would rejoice in a life of many days, exempt from trouble. "_He cometh forth like a flower._"
"They bloom in beauty, side by side; They fill one home with glee."
This is pleasant to contemplate; and if the beauty could but last, forever free from all decay, few would wish for aught of life or love beyond the things of time and sense. But, alas! "_he is cut down_--" and soon
"Their graves are severed far and wide, By mount, and stream, and sea;"
and these graves all tell a tale of buried hopes, buried love, buried peace.
"The same fond mother bent at night O'er each fair sleeping brow; She had each folded flower in sight: Where are those dreamers now!"
We can but sigh our sadness in the closing lines of this beautiful poem--
"Alas, for love! if thou wert all; And naught beyond, O earth!"
Thus do Inspiration and Poetry alike paint the sombre realities of life and death; and point to death as the doom of life.
But I do not love to dwell upon these sad scenes, and will turn your attention at once to a birth that knows no death, to a flower that never fades, to a beauty that knows no decay. And can this be true? Can it be that there is a deathless life, a fadeless flower, a shadowless beauty? It may be that some of you are skeptical about things like these. You may have the unbelief that held the heart of Aaron Burr's daughter against all comfort, when she saw her son die. In her agony of despair she cried out: "Omnipotence itself can never restore to me what I have lost in my only boy."
Your faces may be turned the wrong way. You may be like Lot's wife, _looking back_. And one might just as well talk to a pillar of salt about the glory, and the beauty, and the bliss of the eternal state of the righteous after death, as to talk to men whose backs are heavenward and their faces earthward. You have no eyes in the back part of your heads. Your ears are set to hear what is said to your face, and to catch the sounds that meet you in front. You must turn yourselves round. And more than all this, you must open the eyes of your understandings that the light may shine in, and take the wads of earthly wax out of your ears that you may hear the Savior's words of "_spirit_ and _life_," and loose the strings of your hearts that the _good_ and _truth_ of God's Word may enter. If you will do this I will show you wonderful things. I will show you a fountain from which, if you drink, you will never thirst again. Not like the fabled "Fountain of Youth," which many sought, but never found. The fountain I mean has been found by millions of the human race. It has quenched their thirst forever.