look forward and ask how life will bear hereafter the long look back.  “This night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared whose shall they be?”—­not his, and he had nothing else.  He had laid up treasure for himself, but it was all of this world’s coinage; of the currency of the land whither he went he had none.  In one of Lowell’s most striking poems he pictures the sad retrospect of one who, through fourscore years, had wasted on ignoble ends God’s gift of life; his hands had

        “plucked the world’s coarse gains
    As erst they plucked the flowers of May;”

but what now, in life’s last hours, are gains like these?

    “God bends from out the deep and says,
      ’I gave thee the great gift of life;
    Wast thou not called in many ways? 
      Are not My earth and heaven at strife? 
    I gave thee of My seed to sow,
      Bringest thou Me My hundred-fold?’
    Can I look up with face aglow,
      And answer, ’Father, here is gold’?”

And the end of the poem is a wail: 

    “I hear the reapers singing go
      Into God’s harvest; I, that might
    With them have chosen, here below
      Grope shuddering at the gates of night.”

Wherefore let us set not our minds on the things that are upon earth; let us covet earnestly the best gifts; let us seek first the kingdom of God; and all other things in due season and in due measure shall be added unto us.[52]

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CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT

    “Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving
      Promise and presage of sublime emprise,
    Wears evermore the seal of his believing
      Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,

Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;—­

So even I, and with a heart more burning,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Groan for the hour, O Christ! of Thy returning,
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet.” 
F.W.H.  MYERS, Saint Paul.

* * * * *

XIV

CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT

“They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory....  Of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only."—­MATT. xxiv. 30, 36.

The doctrine of our Lord’s Second Coming occupies at the present moment a curiously equivocal position in the thought of the Christian Church.  On the one hand by many it is wholly ignored.  There is no conscious disloyalty on their part to the word of God; but the subject makes no appeal to them, it