a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, Sermons
I. LIFE'S PERIODS (ITS BEGINNING AND CLOSE) ARE APPOINTED BY GOD. The sacredness of birth and death are brought before us, as we are assured that "there is a time to be born, and a time to die." The believer in God cannot doubt that the Divine Omniscience observes, as the Divine Omnipotence virtually effects, the introduction into this world, and the removal from it, of every human being, Men are born, to show that God will use his own instruments for carrying on the manifold work of the world; they die, to show that he is limited by no human agencies. They are born just when they are wanted, and they die just when it is well that their places should be taken by their successors. "Man is immortal till his work is done." II. LIFE'S OCCUPATIONS ARE DIVINELY ORDERED. The reader of this passage is forcibly reminded of the substantial identity of man's life in the different ages of the world. Thousands of years have passed since these words were penned, yet to how large an extent does this description apply to human existence in our own day! Organic activities, industrial avocations, social services, are common to every age of man's history. If men withdraw themselves from practical work, and from the duties of the family and the state, without sufficient justification, they are violating the ordinances of the Creator. He has given to every man a place to fill, a work to do, a service of helpfulness to render to his fellow-creatures. III. THE EMOTIONS PROPER TO HUMAN LIFE ARE OF DIVINE APPOINTMENT. These are natural to man. The mere feelings of pleasure and pain, the mere impulses of desire and aversion, man shares with brutes. But those emotions which are man's glory and man's shame are both special to him, and have a great share in giving character to his moral life. Some, like envy, are altogether bad; some, like hatred, are bad. or good according as they are directed; some, like love, are always good. The Preacher of Jerusalem refers to joy and sorrow, when he speaks of "a time to laugh, and a time to weep;" to love and hate, for both of which he declares there is occasion in our human existence. There has been no change in these human experiences with the lapse of time; they are permanent factors in our life. Used aright, they become means of moral development, and aid in forming a noble and pious character. IV. THE OPERATION OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE IS APPARENT IN THE VARIED FORTUNES OF HUMANITY. This passage tells of accumulation and consequent prosperity, of loss and consequent adversity. The mutability of human affairs, the disparities of the human lot, were as remarkable and as perplexing in the days of the Hebrew sage as in our own. And they were regarded by him, as by rational and religious observers in our own time, as instances of the working of physical and social laws imposed by the Author of nature himself. In the exercise of divinely entrusted powers, men gather together possessions and disperse them abroad. The rich and the poor exist side by side; and the wealthy are every day impoverished, whilst the indigent are raised to opulence. These are the lights and shades upon the landscape of life, the shifting scenes in life's unfolding drama. Variety and change are evidently parts of the Divine intention, and are never absent from the world of our humanity. V. THE MORAL AND SPIRITUAL ISSUES OF HUMAN LIFE BEAR MARKS OF DIVINE WISDOM AND ORDER. It cannot be the case that all the phases and processes of our human existence are to be apprehended simply in themselves, as if they contained their own meaning, and had no ulterior significance. Life is not a kaleidoscope, but a picture; not the promiscuous sounds heard when the instrumentalists are "tuning up," but an oratorio; not a chronicle, but a history. There is a unity and an aim in life; but this is not merely artistic, it is moral. We do not work and rest, enjoy and suffer, hope and fear, with no purpose to be achieved by the experiences through which we pass. He who has appointed "a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven," designs that we should, by toil and endurance, by fellowship and solitude, by gain and loss, make progress in the course of moral and spiritual discipline, should grow in the favor and in the likeness of God himself. - T.
A time to keep silence. Homilist. There is a proverb which says, Speech is silvern, silence is golden. Like all proverbs, this admits of qualification. There is a silence that means cowardice, sulkiness, and stupidity; and there is a speech that is more precious than any gold, triumphant over error and wrong, quickening and beneficent as the sunbeam. Notice two or three kinds of silences.I. There is the silence of EMOTIONAL FULNESS. It is a physiological fact that great emotions choke the utterance. 1. Great painful emotions do this (Matthew 22:12). Will not all the wicked who stand at the bar of their Maker at the last day be struck with this silence? Emotions of surprise, remorse, despair, will rush with such tumultuousness upon them as to paralyze all articulating power. 2. Great joyous emotions do this. When the father embraced his prodigal son, his heart was so full of joyous feelings that he could not speak. It has been said that superficial emotions chatter, deep emotions are mute: there are joys that are unutterable. II. There is the silence of Pious RESIGNATION. It is said that Aaron held his peace, and the psalmist said, "I was dumb and opened not my mouth because Thou didst it." This indeed is a golden silence: it implies unbounded confidence in the character and procedure of our Heavenly Father. It is a loving, loyal acquiescence in the will of Him who is all-loving, all-wise, and all-good. This silence reveals — 1. The highest reason. Is there a sublimer philosophy than this? 2. The highest faith. Faith in the immutable realities of love and right. III. There is the silence of HOLY SELF-RESPECT. This was the silence which Christ displayed before His judges. He seemed to feel that to speak to such virulently prejudiced creatures would be a degradation. The man who can stand and listen to the language of stolid ignorance, venomous bigotry, and personal insult addressed to him in an offensive spirit, and offer no reply, exerts a far greater power upon the minds of his assailants than he could by words, however forceful. His silence reflects a moral majesty, before which the heart of his assailants will scarcely fail to cower. (Homilist.) A time of war, and a time of peace There are those, among the most conscientious of men, who maintain that war is never permissible, that it has always the nature of sin. Among Englishmen the Quakers have clung to the doctrine of non-resistance as one of their most distinctive tenets; among modern thinkers Count Tolstoi has restated it with considerable force. They have based their argument not so much upon the general tenor of Christ's teaching as upon misinterpretations of isolated texts — e.g. "Resist not evil," "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." It is to their honour that they have been consistent in their interpretation of such passages, often to their own loss, and have applied them both to individual and to national conduct. Yet it is strange that they have not seen how far their argument carries them, and how by exaggerating one counsel of the Gospel they have made other of its precepts of none effect. Toleration of personal injury, to the point of self-effacement, is indeed enjoined upon Christians, but only so far as it does not conflict with other laws of justice and the like. Non-resistance, tolerance of evil and injustice from an individual, may often be most dangerous to society, as an encouragement to crime; and to let an offender go free may be to do him no kindness, but the cruelest of injuries. As with individuals, so with nations. National injustice, greed, insolence, is to be resisted as a danger to humanity. And those who make their appeal to isolated passages of Holy Scripture may be answered by other considerations. To take one only, it may justly be argued that if it were unlawful to wage war, as they assert, it would be unlawful for the Christian to bear arms, and that the soldier's calling would be reprobated in the New Testament. But the exact opposite is the case. The soldier's calling is treated as of equal honour with others, a vocation in which God may be well and truly served. The Christian life is itself compared to a warfare, in which the soldier of Christ is exhorted to fidelity by the example of the Roman soldier. The soldiers who inquire their duty of St. John the Baptist are not told to forsake their calling, but to exercise it with justice and mercy. And from Cornelius, the devout man whose prayers and alms were accepted of God, to St. Martin and General Gordon, a long line of soldier-saints bears eloquent witness to the fact that the grace of God may be looked for, and will bear fruit, in that vocation as in others. We may even go further, and say that war and the military vocation undoubtedly develop in nations and in individuals certain of the simpler virtues. It is often through war, as Mr. Ruskin has told us, that "truth of word and strength of thought" are learnt by nations. "Peace and the vices of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilization; but I found that these were not the words which the muse of history coupled together: and that on her lips the words were — peace, and sensuality — peace, and selfishness — peace, and death." No less marked are its bracing effects upon the individual. "On the whole, the habit of living lightly hearted in daily presence of death, always has had, and always must have, power both in the making and testing of honest men." Many a man by losing himself has found himself, and through the stern discipline of the soldier's life has gained the self-control which otherwise he would have lost. In war men have the opportunity of rising to higher levels of virtue than they would have thought possible of attainment. From Sir Philip Sidney, dying in agony on the field of Zutphen, and refusing the water which another seemed to need more, to the trooper in Matabeleland who gave his horse — and with it his life — for a wounded comrade, there are countless instances of noble unselfishness developed under the stress of sudden decision, sometimes in the most unexpected characters. Nor, if we be wise, shall we complain that the cost is too great. We cannot know that those who have died nobly would have lived nobly. And so we cannot refuse the conclusion that warfare is not necessarily wrong in itself; that it is lawful "for Christian men, at the command of the magistrate, to wear weapons and to serve in the wars": that war is even in some cases a gain in that it tends to the development of national and individual virtues. But of course when this is conceded we are still very far from admitting that it is ever to be undertaken "with a light heart," as the French declared war upon Prussia. The amount of direct and indirect suffering which it causes, immeasurable as that is, is not the greatest of the evils which war brings inevitably in its train. The racial hatreds which it engenders often linger on for scores of years, smouldering fires which a chance gust of passion may easily fan again into flame. Nor can we regard it in any sense as an appeal to the Divine justice, as our forefathers regarded it. War is infinitely the most wasteful, crudest, and least just way of settling international quarrels. And above all, for all its indirect gains, it is to be avoided by Christian nations to the very limits of forbearance, because it hinders the progress of mankind towards the ideals of peace and brotherhood which the Incarnation revealed. War, however just, is an acknowledgment that Christian methods and Christian love have so far failed to be effective. We inquire, lastly, on what conditions warfare may be pronounced justifiable. St. defines the conditions as three in number — the command of the prince, a just cause, and a good intention. The Christian will not hesitate to justify wars morally safeguarded by regard to these conditions. And yet for all that may be said in justification of warfare, war will ever remain a thing grievous to the Christian, ranking with the famine and the pestilence as scourges of God. Upon all Christians there is laid the supreme duty of striving continually for peace, and in these days of democracy no one is without his share of responsibility for national acts. Christians will not shrink from just wars; at the same time they will denounce wars of aggression for material gain. They will endeavour to emphasize the overwhelming responsibility of those in whose power it is t,o declare war, and of those who may influence their decision. They will lose no opportunity of dissociating themselves from those who wantonly disturb the peace of nations, by fostering race-hatreds, magnifying disagreements, offering petty insults, whether in the columns of an intemperate Press, or in any other way. They will promote the principles of arbitration; for though the arbitrators between nations are not backed by force, and cannot compel submission to their decisions, and though long centuries may pass before arbitration can supersede war, yet there is among nations a growing desire to settle differences by that method — an increasing disposition to submit to arbitration, because the justice of the principle is acknowledged. Above all, they will not be ashamed to assert their belief in the efficacy of prayer to the Lord mighty in battle, who is also the Prince of peace, that He would direct aright the counsels of the nations, and would give peace in our time. Who can doubt that wars, in Christendom at least, would soon become rare if all Christians were continually to pray from their inmost heart that God would give to all nations unity, peace, and concord?(E. H. Day, M. A.) People SolomonPlaces JerusalemTopics Apart, Keeping, Mend, Quiet, Rend, Sew, Silence, Silent, Speak, Stitching, Talk, Tear, UndoingOutline 1. by the necessary change of times, vanity is added to human travail11. is an excellence in God's works 16. as for man, God shall judge his works hereafter, though here he be like a beast Dictionary of Bible Themes Ecclesiastes 3:7 4903 time Library Eternity in the Heart'He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also He hath set the world in their heart.'--ECCLES. iii. 11. There is considerable difficulty in understanding what precise meaning is to be attached to these words, and what precise bearing they have on the general course of the writer's thoughts; but one or two things are, at any rate, quite clear. The Preacher has been enumerating all the various vicissitudes of prosperity and adversity, of construction and destruction, of society and solitude, … Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture 'A Time to Plant' For what Christian Men of Our Time Being Free from the Marriage Bond... But Thou who Both Hast Sons, and Livest in that End of the World... Letter xxvi. (Circa A. D. 1127) to the Same The Conclusion of the Matter Of Self-Annihilation Introductory Note. The Lapse of Time. "For they that are after the Flesh do Mind," How the Silent and the Talkative are to be Admonished. The Holy War, A Sermon on Isaiah xxvi. By John Knox. "Who Walk not after the Flesh, but after the Spirit. 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