"For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away : his glory shall
not descend after him." PSALM xlix. 17.
IT is an old familiar story that David is singing
over in his Psalm. He is talking about the worldly
man, and the thought of him suggests, as it so often
does, the coming close of earthly life. The time is
fast approaching when the man of wealth and friends
and bright, gay, shining circumstances, is to leave
them all. He is to put his hand into the hand of a
messenger who comes to summon him, and he is to
go out naked into a new life where the things that
have most illuminated his life here can have no pos-
sibility of existence. When he dieth, he shall carry
nothing away : his glory shall not descend after
him." The rich man leaves his money. The
famous man passes out of the sound of clapping
hands. The Sybarite casts one look back on his
soft cushions, and then goes down the dark, hard
path.
It is one of the oldest of all the thoughts of man,
the separation of a man by death from what he
has accumulated in his life. It has had most differ-
ent effects on different men. Some men it has
paralyzed, as if there could be no use in winning
what they must so soon lose. Other men it has
filled with a feverish eagerness, and made them
work with tenfold zeal, as if they must at once get
all that they could get out of the things which were
so soon to be taken from them. I hope that we
can see that there is an influence more noble and
more just which the certainty that death must
separate us from many of the gains and treasures of
our lives ought to have, and may have, upon us all.
And at the very outset we may notice that power-
ful as this conviction is, much as it weighs upon and
influences our lives, it is not, and it evidently was
not meant to be, the strongest or the most constant
of the powers that influence men s minds. Another
conviction the conviction that it is good to ac-
cumulate the things which make life rich, that the
enrichment of life is in itself a worthy desire for a
human creature, even in spite of the certainty that
it must soon be stripped away, this conviction al-
ways comes in first, and will not let its brightness
be blotted out by the shadow of the coming death.
Surely there is something impressive and very
significant in this.
You go to the merchant, toiling in his shop, piling
his dollar on dollar, and before his eyes you lift the
curtain that hangs only a few rods off and show him
the inevitable future, his pile of money left behind
him to be used in ways for which he does not care,
ways which perhaps he hates, by people whose
whole characters and habits laugh at the way in which
his money has been earned, and he looks up for a
moment at your picture, shakes his head carelessly
at it as if it were the picture of some other man, and
then plunges his hands into his gold again and piles
dollar upon dollar faster than ever, to make up for
lost time. You make the idol of the people enter
by anticipation into the silence of the land where the
praise of fellow-man shall either never for a moment
come, or, if it comes at all, shall only come to show
its hollowness ; and the flush dies out of his face, he
turns pale for a moment, and then the hand is at the
ear again that he may not lose one sweet echo of
the people's shouts. The plodder over books, the
hoarder of mere facts who never gets at principles,
catches one glimpse of the land where principles are
to be the only wealth, and, with just a passing trem-
ble of dismay, goes back again to piling up his ant
hill. No certainty of the coming abandonment of
gains can overcome the passion for acquisition in
the soul of man.
Surely this means something. It must mean that
the passion for acquisition must be taken into ac-
count, must be accepted as a perpetual fact, and
somehow made to live in peace and co-operation
with the other fact of the necessary separation from
their acquisitions which death brings to men. To
put these two truths into their true relation to each
other, to let neither of them kill the other this
must be our study. For truths, we know, are like
the wheels in a machine. They are fitted and
toothed to one another. If they are kept with their
teeth properly intertwined, they keep each other in
motion and help each other work; but if they fall
out of their true connection, then they tear each
other and disturb and spoil the whole machine. To
see how these two facts the fact of man's passion
for acquisition and the fact of man s inevitable loss
of that which he acquires fit together and make a
strong and healthy human life: this will be our
object.
I know I speak to thoughtful men, who are aware
of both these facts in their own active lives. You
all know and feel in some way the human desire to
gain the good things of life ; and yet you all know
well enough that those good things will hardly be
gained before you will have to give them up. Gen-
erally the first knowledge is most vivid, and you live
in its sunshine. But every now and then the second
knowledge sweeps over you like a cloud and hides
the sun. Will it not be a gain if the two knowledges
can be taught to take each other's hands and walk
together, and lead your life, perpetually aware of
both of them, into more peaceful and so more
powerful activity?
Perhaps we can reach our subject best if we think
not immediately of death, but of some other con-
ceivable event which might be seen approaching, and
which, when it arrived, must strip from every man
his earnings. Suppose for instance that all men
could foresee that, at a certain (or an uncertain)
future time, there was coming a great triumph of
communism, with a division of all property and the
abolishment of private rights. What would be the
result of such anticipation? I suppose that there
are two principal results, one or the other of which
we should see in different men according to their
different characters. One class of men would think
only of getting all out of the present which they
could. Well, since so soon we are to have noth-
ing," they would say, "let us make the most of
what we can have now. Let us enjoy the present
to the full." Another class would be so wrapt up
in the prospect of the coming catastrophe that all
chance of enjoying the present would be ruined.
"If all is to be stripped away, what is the use of
winning anything?" they would ask. These two
classes everybody would expect to see, one of
them the class that tries to forget the coming loss
in the excess of present joy, the other losing all
sense of present ownership in the certainty of coming
loss.
But think about it a moment, and see if there is
not a third kind of man, who is at least conceivable.
In that community which is living under the shadow
of the impending communism would there not be
here and there a wise and thoughtful man who would
be saying to himself: "I cannot live only in the
present, and I cannot be apathetic, in despair. I
must work. I must accumulate. But what is there
which I can accumulate which the communistic
tyranny, when it arrives, cannot disturb?" And
when he asks that, can you not see how at once
there must open to him all the great regions of pro-
founder and truer possessions which no redistribution
of property can take away? There are gains won in
the business of a true man s life which would be
just as truly his after the mob had passed through
the town, and turned him out of his house, and
made him share his fortune with the thieves. There
is a property so private that no legislation, no revo-
lution, can disturb it.
Suppose that a man demanded of his business
that it should furnish him with that. Suppose that,
out of all his gaining and spending, he compelled
himself to win breadth and loftiness of character,
patience, value for the spirits and not the forms of
things, a soul superior to the very ministries and
machineries by which the superiority of soul was
won ; and have you not got in that man a real co-
operation in their best result of our two truths,
the truth, first, that man must accumulate, and the
truth, second, that the things which he accumulates
he must part with by and by? Picture the business
man thus earning wealth, in distinct view of the cer-
tainty that he is going to lose it. He presses each
dollar till it yields him moral quality. He stows
away into his character patience and perseverance.
In earning wealth he learns the limits of what wealth
can do, and so a justness and loftiness of soul is
bred within him. By and by comes the great crash,
and when men look to see him stripped as naked as
his most thriftless brethren, behold ! the very loss
of his property has only made it more evident how
thoroughly he is still the possessor of all the moral
qualities which came to him in the winning of his
property. The whirlwind itself seems to look back
at him amazed, for, where it expected to see him
lying a ruin upon the ground, there he stands,
stripped of his leaves indeed, but all the more evi-
dently alive with a life, rich with a riches, which it
is in no power to destroy.
Now, try to carry all that over and apply it to
men's anticipation of death. Death is the great
communism. It levels all our human greatnesses.
Here they are, beggar and prince to-day, one strut-
ting over velvet, the other grovelling in the mire ;
to-morrow both together ashes to ashes, dust to
dust. On this side of the grave are scholar and
dunce, one crowned with all the honors of the
schools, the other wearing life out in a drudgery
only better than the brutes; on the other side,
both alike in the common ignorance of forgetfulness.
How natural, how familiar all that sounds! We
have heard it all our lives ; and oh, how superficial
it all is! How it ignores everything except the
most manifest and material of human acquisitions !
Thank God, the inequalities of wealth are not to
go beyond the grave! Thank God, the rich man s
insolence and the poor man's servility alike are to
be known no longer in the New Jerusalem ! But
the rich man s self-control and the poor man's self-
respect a self-control plucked out of the very heart
of luxury, a self-respect gathered out of the very
mire of men s contempt what has the grave to say
to them? The scholar s love for truth, the unsel
fishness which the servant of the people has learned
in his long years of applauded or unapplauded pub
lic life, when these shine out all the more brightly
in the Everlasting Life, just because the special
subject of the scholar s study has been left behind
among the outgrown interests of earth, and the
temporary interests which engaged the powers of
the public man have been drowned in the crossing
of the river, shall it not then be clear enough how
the truth of necessary acquisition, and the truth
of the necessary loss of the acquired thing, have
worked together?
And this is the result a deeper acquisition, an
acquisition of character. When a man has made his
life render that to him, then he has got down into a
deeper region, or up into a higher one, where the
words which David spoke, in the ordinary middle
region of human experience and thought, are no
longer true. He has come into that higher world
where death has lost his victory. The man does
carry something away with him when he dieth. The
true glory of his life does follow him. What was
true below is no longer true when the man has risen
to the larger conception and larger use of life.
I think I know the difficulty which will suggest
itself in view of thoughts like these. It will seem as
if the perpetual treatment of present life with refer-
ence to the life which is to come would give a sort
of unreality to living which would destroy all its
pleasure, and defeat at once its higher and its lower
purposes. It would seem to threaten us with that
44 other- worldliness," as it has been called, that loss
of the best uses of this world in the morbid expecta-
tion of the next, which has been often alleged by
unchristian people to be the natural tendency of
Christianity.
But here comes in a truth of experience, which
has always seemed to me to be one of the most
beautiful and suggestive indications of the care that
God has for the good growth of His children. I
think that all experience bears witness that the
healthy and sincere use of any of God s blessings
which are in their nature temporary and partial, has
a- tendency to prepare the man who uses them for
higher fields of life in which he shall have outgone
them and left them behind. The hearty enjoyment
of a bright clear day makes a man not less, but more,
ready for those exacting duties in which the sensi-
bilities are too weak to support us, and the con-
science must be summoned to its bravest work.
The grateful and loving acceptance of pleasure as
the gift of God is all the time, unconsciously, with
out the happy mortars thinking of it, stocking his
life with the faith which he will need when he has
to leave the happiness behind and go forth into
some dark sorrow. The soul which God allows to
bask in friendships gathers in them the qualities
which, when the friendships are stripped off from
it, it carries with it into the unfriended and solitary
years which lie beyond. A true and simple child-
hood ceases, but the grown-up man wonders to find
that it has left in him an unexpected faith and
strength for the emergencies of manhood. Every-
where we see some glimpses of this gracious law
that he who lives nobly and simply and devoutly in
any condition which is by its very nature temporary,
accumulates unconsciously in it the outfit which he
is going to need for the higher and more exacting life
into which he is by and by called to pass.
Now, if this same law can apply between the
worlds, do you not see what its results will be?
Just as you live in the pure pleasure of a glorious
day, gratefully and simply taking its joys and duties
at the hand of God, and never thinking about to
morrow, but when to-morrow comes, lo, here in you
is the health which you never sought, but which you
all the time were winning on that glorious yesterday ;
so let the mortal live here in the most pure and
healthy enjoyment of this glorious world, let him
take every duty, let him take every joy in the most
simple loyalty and love, not thinking of a world to
come, thinking only of this world and of how full it
is of God, and of how good it is to live, and to work,
and to touch these lives of our brethren with the
delightful contacts of our different relationships all
met and filled out with the most faithful faithfulness
that we can render; let a man live so, and then some
morning let the gates of immortality fly open, and
the freed soul pass through into the larger life ; and
then how glorious does the working of the law be
come. The public servant, the business man, the
student, the mechanic how completely he has left
his desk, his shop, his books, his tools behind !
But, as he stands on the other side, for a moment
almost at a loss for them, how the chorus of quali-
ties which has been trained within him by his long
service lifts up its voice and greets him: "Lo, we
are with you still ! Lo, we have crossed the river
with you and still are with you ! We, too, are
breathing this celestial air, and we, like you, are
finding ourselves filled to our noblest and completest
being by it. We shall be ready, we who were with
you on the earth, patience and courage, and hope
and truth and humbleness, we shall be ready here
for all the larger work that you will need us for."
Can you imagine that? and then can you imagine
that man, entered on his immortality, with all his
company of earth-trained helpers, looking back to
earth and seeing those whom he has left behind still
in the midst of this intense, delightful life, with the
river still uncrossed? Can you not hear what his
voice would say to them? "Be pure and faithful,"
so the dead would speak to the living; "love God
and do your duty. Enjoy life purely and faithfully.
Do not think of Eternity in any way which shall
make Time less full of eagerness and delight. Be
pure and faithful, and when you come to the river
all that you need to have go over will go over in
you. And you will never miss what cannot cross
with you, but must be left behind because its day is
over.
It is not hard, I am sure, to imagine that, as a
liberated human spirit spoke those words to the
spirits which were still upon the earth, still in the
body, he would be conscious of a double joy : first,
of a joy to know that what he really needed in eter-
nity of all that he had gained on earth his quali-
ties and character were with him still; but also,
secondly, another joy at his release even from those
things in many of which, while he was still in mortal
life, he found much of the joy of living.
Oh, my dear friends, are there not times when all
of us have realized that there is another tone in
which those words of David about the dying man
"He carrieth nothing away with him when he
dieth," meaning, as David certainly did mean, the
mere conditions and machineries of life, that there
is another tone in which those words of David may
be said, a tone of triumph and congratulation? How
many there are, even of things which we have deeply
loved and earnestly enjoyed of which we feel that
this life has given us enough, and that we do not
want to see them any more upon the other side!
How many of the complicated ways of business and
society, much as our hearts are bound up in them
now, we are rejoiced to know will disappear in the
simplicity of heaven ! How often, when we are in
the midst of the elaborate conventionalities of social
life, or planning and planning how to make and
spend our money, or pondering upon the complex
workings of government, or sitting on a charity com-
mittee, or attending a general convention, the words
come to us like a great wave of comfort: "When
you die, you shall carry nothing of all this away
with you " ! To get the kernel some day safely out
of the shell and throw the shell away who does not
sometimes long for that? And when it comes, who
does not dare to believe that, however happy the
shell may have made him in its growing, it will be
easy enough to let it go when, in its going, the
kernel which has grown within it comes forth in its
preciousness and glory?
Have we not then come to some meeting of these
two truths man s ineradicable love of acquisition,
and the certainty that much of what he acquires
must be speedily abandoned? Here is this other
truth that in every legitimate acquisition of man, if
it be won in the loftiest and truest way, there is
something that comes into the man himself, which
is utterly beyond the power of death to destroy,
and must go wherever the man goes, and shall last
while he shall last. Out of the king's reigning
something comes into the king, out of the beg-
gar s begging something comes into the beggar; and
that shall be somewhere, wherever king or beggar
is, long after the king s throne has its new tyrant
and another beggar crouches in the dust where this
forgotten one used to crawl.
And the issue of this fuller truth in practical con-
duct, as I have tried to show, will be that the truest
life must be that which most healthily enjoys and
most faithfully uses the earth and its conditions.
In it the completest preparation is being made for
the great inevitable change. Surely no man ever
more faithfully lived this earthly life than Jesus
Christ did, and yet none was ever readier to lay it
away and go to the Father. In Him the two prin-
ciples worked in perfect harmony. And all the
noblest and completest natures have been marked
by the union and harmony of these two facts ; first,
that they most intensely enjoyed and worked in
life ; and, second, that they were readiest, when the
time came, to change this life for what we call "the
other.
The relation between man and life that is what
we have been studying. How low and base and
degrading that relation may be made, we know full
well. We have seen it all our lives. We can see it
any day. Men who, when they first touched life,
seemed to be all fresh and pure, by and by see how
they are walking as if they had waded through mire,
all smirched and stained and blackened with the
wickedness which they have attracted out of life.
Man and Life how we come to feel that one means
the power of being tempted and soiled, and the other
means the great reservoir of temptation and pollu-
tion out of which no human being can fail to gather
degradation as his time goes on. But there come
moments when we are able to take larger views,
moments when we are able to look back to the first
ideas of Man and Life as they existed in the mind
of God at the beginning, and to look forward to
the Restoration or the Redemption of those ideas
by Christ.
Their Redemption by Christ ! Do we know fully
what that means? It means the reclaiming of the
world, or of a man, for the completest being of
which he is capable, by the power of Him who
manifested the Love of God in all the sincerity and
persuasion of His deadly suffering upon the earth.
You belonged to God. You were by your first idea
His servant and His child. Christ came to claim
you for the God to whom you belonged, to make
you know, to force and crowd it home upon you so
that you could not help knowing, that you were His
child ; and then to turn this whole world into a great
nursery for His child s education.
If that could be completely done, if you and the
world about you could be so redeemed, then, is it
not evident that all this which I have been trying to
describe must come to pass? The very type of a
being living in the present, using it enthusiastically
and never making any plans beyond it, but yet
gathering out of it the very best sort of preparation
for the unopened future, is found in the happy and
obedient child, living loyally in his father s house,
and gathering every day into his nature unconscious
preparation for the years to come. What does the
boy of fourteen know about the anxieties and cares
of forty? When does he stop to think whether he
will be ready for the cares and anxieties of forty,
when it comes? And yet when, by and by, he
crosses that critical line which seems to carry him
into another world, it is what he has gathered un-
consciously in his father's house that he carries with
him to be his equipment in the untried years.
Now, the Redemption of Christ makes men, as I
have said, know that they are, and so makes them
practically to be, God s children. It transforms the
world into God's house. What it does, then, for
us, is to make us repeat in our life this experience of
childhood. For us, too, living in Christ s Redemp-
tion, each present, thankfully accepted and con-
scientiously used, becomes the preparation for greater
things to come. Out from each period, into the
period which waits beyond, we carry the personal
qualities which have been born in us as we lay upon
the bosom of His Fatherhood. And at the last,
when we die, the leaving of all earthly circumstances
behind only makes more absolutely clear to us that
the new world to which we go is part of the same
Father's house; and that we who go there carry our
perpetual childhood to the same Father to whom
Christ has redeemed and reconciled us here.
This ought to come with great assurance and com-
fort to those of you who have watched the dying
of your friends. Some busy man, right by your
side, in the full current of activity, has seen the
inevitable summons and dropped the tools of life
and gone away. The day after he is buried, you
walk through his empty house. There is all that
used to identify him to you. The shelves are
crowded with the books he loved. The furniture is
full of memories of him. Signs of his wealth and
tokens of his taste are everywhere. The clothes he
wore still keep his shape. The instruments with
which he worked have hardly yet grown cold.
Some friend beside you says: "Poor fellow, it was
very hard to leave all this ! How he worked for it
all! How he enjoyed it all! And now he has left
it all behind ! David was right ; when he died, he
did, indeed, carry nothing away."
But then, if you have got hold of our truth, does
not your heart perhaps remonstrate : Nay, for this
man David was not right ; David was wrong ! Did
he really carry nothing away, he who went into
the mysterious world beyond, rich in wisdom, pa-
tience, and trust, with purity that had been tried
and whitened in the fire, with a judgment enlarged
and a soul ripened by countless struggles? Has he
carried nothing, he who goes wrought and kneaded
through and through with the certainty that he is
God's child, which he has gained out of a thousand
quiet communions with his Father, and a hundred
terrible emergencies when he has had to cling to his
Father s Fatherhood with desperate hands? Does
he carry nothing he who carries the new self which
was born in the new birth?
There are times when the old chant changes;
when, not that man leaves everything behind him,
but that man takes everything with him, becomes
the certainty that fills our souls as we hear the step
of Death coming to call us or to call our brethren
away.
How terrible that certainty is! How glorious
that certainty is ! How it makes any patient and
conscientious work, as one tries to do it here in
Christ s name, shine with all the radiance of eter-
nity! "Work on," one wants to cry to all true
workers, "work on with all your might. No matter
whether you seem to succeed or seem to fail, no
matter whether men give you praise or blame. You
are gathering character. You are becoming more
and more a child of God. And when the call comes,
though the work must all be left, the worker will go
on and up, carrying with him all that the grace and
goodness of God has made him be."
May the hope of that day, and of all that lies be-
yond it, strengthen our hearts and hands when they
grow weak !
