Mortality, Reminders of – Charles Spurgeon

THE whole of nature around us helps us to recollect that we are mortal. Look at the year. It is born amid the songs of birds and the beauty of upspringing flowers, it comes to its ripeness and luscious fruits and shouts of harvest home; but anon the old age of autumn comes, and a lamentation is heard, “The harvest is passed and the summer is ended.” Amidst the fall of decaying leaves, and the howling of the cold winds of winter the year finds its end. So too with every day. Well does Herbert sing—

“Sweet day, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky,

The dew must weep your fall tonight,

For you must die.”

Every flower we see lavishing its fragrance on the breeze, trembles because it hears the footsteps of death. It blooms that it may wither; “Its root is ever in its grave, and it must die.” Where see you immortal things beneath the moon? Lift up your eyes, look where you may, see you not everywhere change, and mutability, and departure, written upon nature’s brow! and all this God hangs up, as it were, as a notice upon the wall, like the mystic characters which amazed Belshazzar, that we may not dare to forget that it is appointed unto all men once to die. Nay, as if this were not all, not only is nature full of helps to make us familiar with the grave, but our own bodies also tell us of our appointed change. What is that grey hair but the beginning, the first sign, the foretoken of the coming winter which shall freeze the life-current within the vein and chill the heart itself? What is that loosened tooth but a part of the fabric crumbling to let us know that the whole tenement must soon come down? What are those aches and pains, and what that decay of the eyesight, and that dullness of hearing, what those tottering knees, and wherefore that staff, but that we may receive clear warnings that the whole tabernacle is shaking in the rude winds of time, and must soon totter to its fall? The Lord will not suffer us to win a freehold here, but he puts affliction into our family, and disease into our flesh, in order that we may seek after a better country, even a heavenly. Let me exhort you then, beloved brethren in Christ, seeing you have all these mementos, to keep the lamp of the sepulcher always burning in your chambers, and to be well acquainted with the shroud and the winding-sheet.