Twenty-Five Village Sermons | Page 9

Thou
hidest Thy face, they are troubled: Thou takest away their breath, they
die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth Thy spirit, they are
created: and Thou renewest the face of the earth."
I had intended to go through this psalm with you in regular order; but
things have happened this parish, awful and sad, during the last week,
which I was bound not to let slip without trying to bring them home to
your hearts, if by any means I could persuade the thoughtless ones
among you to be wise and consider your latter end:-- I mean the sad
deaths of various of our acquaintances. The death- bell has been tolled
in this parish three times, I believe, in one day--a thing which has
seldom happened before, and which God grant may never happen again.
Within two miles of this church there are now five lying dead. Five
human beings, young as well as old, to whom the awful words of the
text have been fulfilled: "Thou takest away their breath, they die, and
return to their dust." And the very day on which three of these deaths
happened was Ascension-day-- the day on which Jesus, the Lord of life,
the Conqueror of death, ascended upon high, having led captivity
captive, and became the first-fruits of the grave, to send down from the
heaven of eternal life the Spirit who is the Giver of life. That was a
strange mixture, death seemingly triumphant over Christ's people on
the very day on which life triumphed in Jesus Christ Himself. Let us
see, though, whether death has not something to do with Ascension-day.
Let us see whether a sermon about death is not a fit sermon for the
Sunday after Ascension-day. Let us see whether the text has not a
message about life and death too--a message which may make us feel
that in the midst of life we are in death, and that yet in the midst of
death we are in life; that however things may SEEM, yet death has not

conquered life, but life has conquered and WILL conquer death, and
conquer it most completely at the very moment that we die, and our
bodies return to their dust.
Do I speak riddles? I think the text will explain my riddles, for it tells
us how life comes, how death comes. Life comes from God: He sends
forth His spirit, and things are made, and He renews the face of the
earth. We read in the very two verses of the book of Genesis how the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters the creation, and woke
all things into life. Therefore the Creed well calls the Holy Ghost, the
Spirit of God, that is--the Lord and Giver of life. And the text tells us
that He gives life, not only to us who have immortal souls, but to every
thing on the face of the earth; for the psalm has been talking all through,
not only of men, but of beasts, fishes, trees, and rivers, and rocks, sun
and moon. Now, all these things have a life in them. Not a life like ours;
but still you speak rightly and wisely when you say, 'That tree is alive,
and, That tree is dead. That running water is live water--it is sweet and
fresh, but if it is kept standing it begins to putrefy, its life is gone from
it, and a sort of death comes over it, and makes it foul, and
unwholesome, and unfit to drink.' This is a deep matter, this, how there
is a sort of life in every thing, even to the stones under our feet. I do not
mean, of course, that stones can think as our life makes us do, or feel as
the beasts' life makes them do, or even grow as the trees' life makes
them do; but I mean that their life keeps them as they are, without
changing or decaying. You hear miners and quarrymen talk very truly
of the live rock. That stone, they say, was cut out of the live rock,
meaning the rock as it is under ground, sound and hard--as it would be,
for aught we know, to the end of time, unless it was taken out of the
ground, out of the place where God's Spirit meant it to be, and brought
up to the open air and the rain, in which it is not its nature to be. And
then you will see that the life of the stone begins to pass from it bit by
bit, that it crumbles and peels away, and, in short, decays and is turned
again to its dust. Its organisation, as it is called, or life, ends, and
then--what? does the