for life. But threadbare as it is, its
significance is inexhaustible. But before I deal with it, note that very
significant 'but' with which my text begins. The Prophet has been asking
for a little more light to shine on the dark unknown that stretches
before him. And his request is negatived--'_But_ go thou thy way.' In
the connection that means, 'Do not waste your time in dreaming about, or
peering into, what you can never see, but fill the present with
strenuous service.' 'Go thou thy way.' Never mind the far-off issues;
the step before you is clear, and that is all that concerns you. Plod
along the path, and leave to-morrow to take care of itself. There is a
piece of plain practical wisdom, none the less necessary for us to lay
to heart because it is so obvious and commonplace.

And then, if we turn to the emblem with which the continuity of daily
life and daily work is set forth here, as the path along which we
travel, how much wells up in the shape of suggestion, familiar, it may
be, but very needful and wholesome for us all to lay to heart!

The figure implies perpetual change. The landscape glides past us, and
we travel on through it. How impossible it would be for us older people
to go back to the feelings, to the beliefs, to the tone and the temper
with which we used to look at life thirty or forty years ago! Strangely
and solemnly, like the silent motion of some gliding scene in a theatre,
bit by bit, inch by inch, change comes over all surroundings, and,
saddest of all, in some aspects, over ourselves.

'We all are changed, by still degrees,
All but the basis of the soul.'

And it is foolish for us ever to forget that we live in a state of
things in which constant alteration is the law, as surely as, when the
train whizzes through the country, the same landscape never meets the
eye twice, as the traveller looks through the windows. Let us, then,
accept the fact that nothing abides with us, and so not be bewildered
nor swept away from our moorings, nor led to vain regrets and paralysing
retrospects when the changes that must come do come, sometimes slowly
and imperceptibly, sometimes with stunning suddenness, like a bolt out
of the blue. If life is truly represented under the figure of a journey,
nothing is more certain than that we sleep in a fresh hospice every
night, and leave behind us every day scenes that we shall never traverse
again. What madness, then, to be putting out eager and desperat