ted by the reception or rejection of that
word. So, when we summon around us the congregation of the dead, which
is more numerous than the audience of the living to whom I now speak,
the lesson that their silent presence teaches us is, 'Wherefore we
should give the more earnest heed to the things that we have heard.'

II. Let us note the abiding Word, which these transient generations of
hearers and speakers have had to do with.

It is maddening to think of the sure decay and dissolution of all human
strength, beauty, wisdom, unless that thought brings with it
immediately, like a pair of coupled stars, of which the one is bright
and the other dark, the corresponding thought of that which does not
pass, and is unaffected by time and change. Just as reason requires some
unalterable substratum, below all the fleeting phenomena of the
changeful creation--a God who is the Rock-basis of all, the staple to
which all the links hang--so we are driven back and back and back, by
the very fact of the transiency of the transient, to grasp, for a refuge
and a stay, the permanency of the permanent. 'In the year that King
Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne'--the passing away of
the mortal shadow of sovereignty revealed the undying and true King. It
is blessed for us when the lesson which the fleeting of all that _can_
flee away reads to us is that, beneath it all, there is the Unchanging.
When the leaves drop from the boughs of the trees that veil the face of
the cliff, then the steadfast rock is visible; and when the generations,
like leaves, drop and rot, then the rock background should stand out the
more clearly.

Zechariah meant by the 'word of God' simply the prophetic utterances
about the destiny and the punishment of his nation. We ought to mean by
the 'word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever,' not merely the
written embodiment of it in the Old or New Testament, but the Personal
Word, the Incarnate Word, the everlasting Son of the Father, who came
upon earth to be God's mouthpiece and utterance, and who is for us all
_the_ Word, the Eternal Word of the living God. It is His perpetual
existence rather than the continuous duration of the written word,
declaration of Himself though it is, that is mighty for our strength and
consolation when we think of the transient generations.

Christ lives. That is the deepest meaning of the ancient saying, 'All
flesh is grass.... The Word of the Lord endureth for ever.'