eternity.

We are launched in the midst of a sea of eternity, and all the time that
comes to us comes by solemn public measurement, measurement conducted in
the most formal and stately manner by the hand of the Creator. He made
that heaven from which we can never shut our regard--we must see it; and
in it He set those lights "for signs and for seasons and for days and for
years." He might easily have given us a being that would have flowed on
evenly from its beginning to its close without anything to mark it off
into stages. We may almost watch a sunbeam starting from the sun and
racing all the way to our world, passing over it, far on beyond it, till
our eye and even our thought cannot follow it, and never anything to
check or register its progress.

But not so the career that God has appointed to us. Everything is dealt
to us under an economy of measure, of trust and of account. "For
signs"--He set those things above us for signs. Cannot earth be a sign
to herself? Cannot man be his own directory? Cannot the seas and the
mountains and the rivers and trees and houses be their own tokens? Try
this. Let that ship at sea, on which the fog has settled, ask the waves
to say where is north, south, east or west; and when the gale springs up
and the clouds cover the heavens let her ask the winds to tell how far
from port. No, if the heavens give no signs she has none, she cannot
tell where she is or whither she is going.

Suppose you find yourself within a mile of the house in which you were
born: you know, as you think, every step of the way as well as you know
your own bedroom; but there is neither sun nor moon nor star, the heavens
are completely shut off and you are left to earth alone. Will the trees
tell you the way? Will the houses show themselves? Will the road be its
own exhibitor? No, if heaven fails you you cannot even see your own
hand. You are under the perpetual preaching of the sky, that all your
hours and all your movements are dependent upon heaven!

"For seasons" as well as for signs. The Lord might easily have
established our lifetime under a different economy; might have given us
one perpetual summer, or a perpetual spring, or a uniform co-existence of
all the seasons, the fruits being sown, ripening and reaped
simultaneously. But not so. He has settled two things so clearly that
none, even the most sordid worm that ever wriggled under the clay,
showing himself above it as little as p