Of course the first application of such words is to purely sensuous delights.
Men who seek to make life a mere revel and banquet. Nothing is so short-lived as gratification of appetite. It is not merely that each act lasts but for a moment, but also that past gratifications leave no sort of solace to the appetite behind them; whereas past acquirements or deeds of goodness are a perpetual joy as well as the foundation of the present. There is something essentially isolated in each act of sensuous delight. No man can by so willing recall the taste of eaten food, nor slake his thirst by remembrance of former draughts, or cool himself by thinking of' frosty Caucasus.' But each such gratification is done when it is done, and there is an end of its power to gratify.
Further, the power of enjoyment wanes, though the lust for it waxes. Hence each act has less and less power of satisfying.
One sees blase young men of twenty-five. It was a man of under thirty-five who wrote,' Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.' It was a used-up roue that was represented as saying, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' It was of sensuous' pleasures that poor Burns wrote, like the snowfall in the river.
A moment white,--then melts for ever.'
When a people is given over to such excess, late or soon the fate of Samaria comes upon them. Think of the French Revolution or of the fall of Rome, and learn that the prophet was announcing a law for all nations, in his fiery denunciation, and one which holds good to-day as ever.
But we may generalise more widely. Every godless life is essentially transitory; of course, all life is so in one view. But suppose two men, working side by side at the same occupation, passing through the same circumstances. So far as physical changes go, these men are the same. Both lose much. Both leave behind much. Both cease to be interested in much that was dear to them. Both die at last, and leave it all. Is there any difference? The transitoriness is the same, and the eternal consequences are eternal alike in both; and yet there is a very solemn sense in which the one man's life has utterly perished, and the other's abides. Suppose a man, educated to be a first-rate man of business, dies. Which of his trained faculties will he have scope for in that new order of things? Or a student, or a lawyer, or a statesman?
Oh, it is not our natural mortality that makes these thoughts so awful; but it is the thought that the man who is doing these things is immortal The head which wears the fading wreath will live for ever. What will ye do in the end?'
