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I. "NO MAN LIVETH UNTO HIMSELF."

1. We gather about the grave of one who, while he lived, withdrew himself largely from contact with men, and from the activities of his generation; and we say of him, "There was a man who lived entirely to himself." No, he did not! That reserve and isolation are as definite a power in the world as the marching of a regiment. When, on the sea, the wind suddenly becomes chill and the fog thickens, and the commander paces the deck with anxious face, you know that you are in the neighbourhood of an iceberg — though the iceberg has cabled you no message. And just so with those moral icebergs. The air grows chillier whenever they approach. The frost of their selfishness nips the kindly buds of other lives and makes them as fruitless as their own.

2. And if this is so, how clearly we see the force of the text when we look at some character of an opposite type! Here is a man with fine sympathies and endowments whose life seems to be engrossed in his business or his studies. What an influence he could wield, we think, if he could set out of that narrow round which holds him to such petty cares! But every one of those cares touches some other life. His partners, clerks, workmen, children, and servants — all these are conscious that something warmer and ampler than the starved currents of their own being has flowed into their lives through him.

3. In a word, all life in man is consistent — the highest form of it with the lowest — the life of the soul with the life of the nerves. There are two sets of nerves, those of motion and those of sensation, running side by side like a railway with a double track. One set of nerves or tracks brings us the incoming trains — the tidings and influences from without; the other set dispatches the influences from within. To have both these sets of nerves constantly doing their duty — to have my eye and ear and the nerves which are connected with them correctly reporting to me the beauty and the melody that are outside, and then to have lips and every organ of expression accurately transmitting to others the thought and purpose that are within — this is life. But suppose that while my nervous system is receiving impressions it has become incapable of expression. It would be paralysis, and paralysis is simply an incipient form of death. Life is virtually impossible without expression, and that expression for ever betrays the man that is behind it. There are many who are trying to live to themselves in the sense that they are trying to keep the quality of their lives a secret. Let me exhort them to desist from such an impossible undertaking. The world will be quick to find out what brings the throb into your pulse and the light into your eye. And therefore your life will be worthier and happier if you frankly recognise that it is the law of your being to betray itself.

II. "NO MAN DIETH TO HIMSELF."

1. Does this mean that when a man comes to his death-bed, his end must needs reveal himself, and so strongly influence others? Hardly; for there is a physical terror of death which is the characteristic of certain timid and sensitive natures, and the more devout the character, the keener often is its dismay. And on the other hand, there are persons with such force of will, that the acted career they have been playing all along, they play with equal composure to the very end.

2. The significance of death is to be found in the temper and purpose with which it is contemplated and approached. Do we understand that the process of life is double, and that every step forward is a progress in decay and an experience of death? The worn-out weariness of the octogenarian utters itself, incipiently, in the tired slumber of the child. Man is acting, from the beginning, with a certainty in view. And how is he acting? Knowing that he will die, is he using his life as if it were a vestibule or a terminus? Conscious that a part of himself will drop away into the grave and a part endure beyond it, is he living for what will perish, or rather for what will last? For what is it that happens at death?

(1) We have been too busy to recognise clearly the character and quality of a man who lived, it may be, right alongside of us. But suddenly he falls, and then all the past somehow pieces itself together and becomes an intelligible whole; and behind the mannerisms, or whatever it was that sometimes offended us, we see the shining track of a noble Christian life. And, looking back over such a pathway, we realise how "no man dieth to himself"; we see how death groups together and garners up the whole drift of the man's career, and we thank God for one more good example.

(2) To such a portraiture there must needs be an opposite. Did you ever think to yourself with a shudder that you were glad some one was dead? Here is a life that; has touched nothing that it has not debased. But the misery of the death of a bad man is that it has so enormous a propagating power. Their burial galvanises into new life all the memories of their dreary past.

(Bp. H. C. Potter.)

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KJV: For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.

WEB: For none of us lives to himself, and none dies to himself.