Gold Nugget 152 - A Higher Purpose

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      Labour is the destiny of man, and is in most cases the indispensable condition of not only life itself, but of those things for the sake of which many men value life – wealth, comfort, pleasure, and fame.  Yet in how many cases doe toil fail to secure the objects for the sake of which it is undertaken! … Men toil for years, and when they attain that upon which their hearts were set, disappointment and dissatisfaction take possession of their nature. …

      The brute is content to eat and drink, to sleep, and to follow its several instincts and impulses.  But of man we may say that nothing that he can be and do can give him perfect rest and satisfaction.  It is owing to an innate and noble dissatisfaction that he is ever aiming at something better and higher, and that the narrow range and brief scope of human life cannot content him, cannot furnish him to the very nature of earthly things, which, because they are finite, are incapable of satisfying such a nature as that described.  They may and do answer a high purpose when their true import is discerned – when they are recognized as symbolical and significant of what is greater than themselves. …

      There is in human life a continuity only discerned by the reflecting and the pious.  The obvious striking fact is the disconnection of the generations.  But as evolution reveals a physical continuity, philosophy finds an intellectual and moral continuity in our race.

      The purpose of God is unfolded to successive generations of men.  The modern study of the philosophy of history has brought this face prominently and effectively before the attention of the scholarly and thoughtful.  We see this continuity and progress in the order of revelation; but all history is, in a sacred sense, a revelation of the Eternal and Unchanging.

      It is well that what we do we should do deliberately and seriously, not for our own good merely, but for mankind, and in the truest sense for God.  This will lend “profit” to the unprofitable.

      This state is not all.  Life explains school; summer explains spring; and so eternity shall explain the disappointments, perplexities, and anomalies of time.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Ecclesiastes p.16, Ecclesiastes 1:3-4, (J. R. Thomson)

 

Gold Nugget 152

A Higher Purpose

 

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