his
influence. What was all that worth? The prophet comes to himself in a
dungeon, and wakes to the bitter conviction, that his influence had
told much in the way of commanding attention, and even winning
reverence, but very little in the way of gaining souls; the bitterest,
the most crushing discovery in the whole circle of ministerial
experience. All this was seeming failure.

And this, brethren, is the picture of almost all human life. To some
moods, and under some aspects, it seems, as it seemed to the psalmist,
"Man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain." Go to
any churchyard, and stand ten minutes among the grave-stones; read
inscription after inscription recording the date of birth, and the
date of death, of him who lies below, all the trace which myriads have
left behind, of their having done their day's work on God's
earth,--that is failure or--seems so. Cast the eye down the columns of
any commander's despatch after a general action. The men fell by
thousands; the officers by hundreds. Courage, high hope,
self-devotion, ended in smoke--forgotten by the time of the next list
of slain: that is the failure of life once more. Cast your eye over
the shelves of a public library--there is the hard toil of years, the
product of a life of thought; all that remains of it is there in a
worm-eaten folio, taken down once in a century. Failure of human life
again. Stand by the most enduring of all human labours, the pyramids
of Egypt. One hundred thousand men, year by year, raised those
enormous piles to protect the corpses of the buried from rude
inspection. The spoiler's hand has been there, and the bodies have
been rifled from their mausoleum, and three thousand years have
written "failure" upon that. In all that, my Christian brethren, if we
look no deeper than the surface, we read the grave of human hope, the
apparent nothingness of human labour.

And then look at this history once more. In the isolation of John's
dying hour, there appears failure again. When a great man dies we
listen to hear what he has to say, we turn to the last page of his
biography first, to see what he had to bequeath to the world as his
experience of life. We expect that the wisdom, which he has been
hiving up for years, will distil in honeyed sweetness then. It is
generally not so. There is stupor and silence at the last. "How dieth
the wise man?" asks Solomon: and he answers bitterly,