Monotony of Life – Charles Spurgeon

I NOTICED in a shop window last week a little invention of singular interest. A small metal wire, with a circular disc at each end, was suspended by a thread, and continued without ceasing to oscillate between two small galvanic batteries, first touching one and then the other. A little card informed me that this piece of metal had continued to move to and fro between those two batteries for more than thirty years, and had during that time passed over six thousand miles. The whole affair was so enclosed with a glass case that nothing was likely to disturb it, and so it kept the even tenor of its way, with a history which could be summed up in two lines of plainest prose. To and fro, to and fro for thirty years, and that was its whole monotonous history. Men’s quiet lives are much after the same order; they have gone to business on Monday morning and home at night, the same on Tuesday and all the days of the year; no dire struggles, no fierce temptations, no gracious victories, no divine experiences of heavenly love; their whole inner life meager of interest, because so free from every trial. But look at the man who is subject to trials, temporal and spiritual, and acquainted with difficulties of every sort! he is like you mass of iron on the prow of a gallant barque which has crossed the Pacific and bathed itself in the Atlantic; storms have dashed upon it, a myriad waves have broken over it; it has seen the terrors of all the seas, and gleamed in the sunlight of both hemispheres. It has served its age most gloriously, and when old and worn with rust a world of interest surrounds it.