Homilies Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made every thing beautiful in his time: also he has set the world in their heart… God has set eternity in the heart of man. This explains — I. Its SENSE OF THE EMPTINESS OF ALL MUNDANE THINGS. No more can the world satisfy what is in man than a dewdrop can quench the burning thirst of a lion. Its unbroken and unsilenceable cry after it has received all the world can give, is, "More, more." II. Its CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE UNSTABILITY OF ALL THINGS CONNECTED WITH OUR EARTHLY LIFE. The sense of mutation rests constantly and heavily on the soul. But this sense could not exist if there was not something in us that is unchanged and unchanging. As that rock, which lifts its majestic head above the ocean, and alone remains unmoved amidst the restless waves, and the passing fleets, is the only measure to the voyager of all that moves on the great world of waters, so the sense of the immutable, which Heaven has planted in our souls, is the standard by which alone we become conscious of the mutation of our earthly life. III. Its YEARNING TO LOOK INTO THE INVISIBLE. Inquiry into the reason of things is a deep and resistless instinct. In the child it is called curiosity, in the man, the philosophic spirit. But the reason of things is behind this sense, it is in the region of the invisible, and the invisible is the eternal. I see not my soul, and that is eternal, and its inquiries are after the eternal. IV. Its CONSTANT ANTICIPATIONS OF THE FUTURE. Its past is gone, however long and eventful it might have been. Gone as a vision of the night. To the future it looks, onward is its anxious glance. It "never is, but always to be blessed." V. Its INEXHAUSTIBILITY BY ITS PRODUCTIONS. The more the fruitful tree produces, the less it will produce in the future, and it will at last exhaust itself by its productions. Not so with the soul. The more fruit it yields, the more fecundant it becomes. The more a man thinks, the more capable he is of thinking; the more he loves, the deeper becomes the fountains of affection within him. VI. Its UNIVERSAL YEARNING FOR A GOD. "Man as a race," says Liddon, "is like those captains of whom we read, more than once, in history, that once having believed a throne to be within their grasp, they never could settle down again quietly as contented subjects. Man as man has a profound, an ineradicable instinct of his splendid destiny. He knows that the objects which meet his eye, that the average words which fall upon his ear, that the common thoughts and purposes and passions which haunt his heart and his brain, are very far indeed from being adequate to his real capacity." He wants God, nothing less than God Himself. VII. Its ABIDING SENSE OF PERSONAL IDENTITY. The old man who has passed through a long life of great changes, and whose bodily frame, too, has been several times exchanged, has, notwithstanding, an ineradicable belief that he is the same person as when a boy at school. He has no doubt of it. Bodies may be lost in bodies, but souls never lost in souls. Why this? It is because there is eternity in us. (Homilies.) Parallel Verses KJV: He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. |
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