SERMON XXVII – William Elbert Munsey
A fragment.
THE DYING YEAR: — WATCHNIGHT.
THIS is the first Sabbath and the first day in 1871. Last night the Old Year died. — Did you see that old man, so pale, frail, and ghostly, who stood out upon the bleak and icy hills last night, leaning in his decrepitude upon the feeble arm of his last surviving but dying child, the departing December ? The chaplet of buds, flowers, and fruit, wreathed around his brow by Spring, Summer, and Autumn were frosted by Winter ; his sandals were old and covered with snow and mud ; his garments were tattered, and glistening with sleet were folded around his wasted form ; his gray locks were frosty ; his breath was cold ; and his pulse quivered like an icy thread in his chilled and shrunken arm.
Who was he ? He was the child of remorseless Time. He was one of a numerous family whose genealogy presents us no two contemporaries. The birth of one has always been preceded by the death of the solitary other. The wailing requiems over the death of the one have always ended in lullabies over the cradle of its successor. Who was he ? He was the Old Year. Last night, Eternity’s horologe tolled out low twelve upon its sounding bell. It was his death-knell — and at that lonely hour while we slept, when cadaverous ghosts are fabled to creep amid the ivied ruins of castles old, and shriek through the crevices of tottering church belfries, and dry old bones shake and clatter in their vaults in church- yards, he died, and the spirits of winter hearsed him in a cold cloud drawn by boreal winds, and drove him out to sepulchral oblivion and buried him in a grave whose cerements are eternal. He will return no more — no, forever. Farewell, Old Year ! let thy cold ghost mingle with the shades of thy predecessors, but let it not come back, oh, let it not come back, to haunt us when we die.
Gone, but he has left his footprints. The lovely babe the mother so fondly kissed last New Year is not here this morning. It simply came, smiled, then wept and departed. It seemed to come from heaven, and to stay just long enough to make us love it, and then to return. Its mission appears to have been to gather up our affections and carry them back to heaven with it, to make us love heaven more, and earth less. Some beautiful girls and noble boys, whose laugh and shout enlivened our homes during the last Christmas and New Year holidays, are not with us to-day. Dreamless, they sleep beneath the snows of the winter in our neighboring cemeteries, and foul decay has marred their lovely forms. In placing the house in order for these holidays we have found a toy, a shoe, a hat, a book, unclaimed and ownerless, which made us weep anew. Oh, shall they ever live again ? The old arm-chair which sat in the corner, and was tenanted by smiling old age one year ago, is empty now — its occupant is gone and some of us are fatherless. The head of the table is also vacated, the dust lies heavily upon the mantel- piece, and disorder has crept into the family chamber, for with some of us mother is gone too. Some friend is gone, some familiar footfall is missed, some well-known voice is hushed. The receding year has touched us somewhere. We are a year older, a year nearer the grave. This year may land us in heaven, or sink us in hell. Are you ready to die ? If die we must, this year, may we ascend to heaven.
But as the misty spirit of the Old Year wreathed away into the dark dim past, the angels of God sang the birth hymn of the New Year. And still you may hear the inspiring touches of the dying music still lingering in the mountain-tops, and quivering gently in the happy air, and coursing sweetly the nerve corridors leading to the mind’s sensorium to greet the human soul. 18 71 is here. How many years since the world was made I know not, neither does any man. How many years since man was made I know not — our chronologies cannot be absolutely relied upon. But it is eighteen hundred and seventy-one years since the infant Saviour was born, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, and laid to sleep in a manger ; eighteen hundred and thirty-eight years since His crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension to heaven.
The New Year is here, and with him his children. Two come crowned with glittering frost, and robes of trailing snow ; two with tempests in their fists, and stray sunbeams upon their brows ; four clothed in green enamelled with buds, flowers, and fruit, and straited with golden ripeness ; three with robes of red, yellow, and purple ; one in freezing nudity with a sceptre of ice. Before the first may pass we may be dead, and the remaining eleven may dance their rounds upon our graves. No year has ever passed without some one dying whom we knew and loved. Every succeeding year marks its number and name upon some tombstone in our cemetery. Our burial grounds keep up the record of the ages. This year will be the date of the death of some one present. 1871 will be chiselled in the marble which will mark some of our graves. Who ?