on fevered brows, and lessen the pulsations of hearts
that throb for earth.

But whilst it is not wholesome to be always thinking of death, it is
more unwholesome still never to let the contemplation of that end come
into our calculations of the future, and to shape our lives in an
obstinate blindness to what is the one certain fact which rises up
through the whirling mists of the unknown future, like some black cliff
from the clouds that wreath around it. Is it not strange that the surest
thing is the thing that we forget most of all? It sometimes seems to me
as if the sky rained down opiates upon people, as if all mankind were in
a conspiracy of lunacy, because they, with one accord, ignore the most
prominent and forget the only certain fact about their future; and in
all their calculations do _not_' so number their days' as to 'apply'
their 'hearts unto wisdom.' 'Go thou thy way until the end,' and let thy
way be marked out with a constant eye towards the end.

II. Note, again, the resting-place.

'Go thou thy way, for thou shalt rest.' Now, I suppose, to most careful
readers that clearly is intended as a gracious, and what they call a
euphemistic way of speaking about death. 'Thou shalt rest'; well, that
is a thought that takes away a great deal of the grimness and the terror
with which men generally invest the close. It is a thought, of course,
the force of which is very different in different stages and conditions
of life. To you young people, eager, perhaps ambitious, full of the
consciousness of inward power, happy, and, in all human probability,
with the greater portion of your lives before you in which to do what
you desire, the thought of 'rest' comes with a very faint appeal. And
yet I do not suppose that there is any one of us who has not some burden
that is hard to carry, or who has not learned what weariness means.

But to us older people, who have tasted disappointments, who have known
the pressure of grinding toil for a great many years, whose hearts have
been gnawed by harassments and anxieties of different kinds, whose lives
are apparently drawing nearer their end than the present moment is to
their beginning, the thought, 'Thou shalt rest,' comes with a very
different appeal from that which it makes to these others.

'There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
And I have had trouble enough for one,'

says our great modern poet; and therein he echoes the deepest thoughts
of most of