The Scenes Move Swiftly – Sunday, March 21, 1954
In the ultimate sense no man and no set of circumstances can keep another man from what he has earned. As Emerson observed: “Persons and events may stand for a time between [us] and justice, but it is only a. postponement. [We] must pay at least [our] own debt”1 — and, it should be added, we shall certainly at last, or sooner, receive our merited reward.
And with life passing so swift, some of these so-called “ultimate” eventualities come sooner than we suppose. If we have approached or passed the halfway mark of the “normal” life of man, it is probable that few who were as old as we are now, when we were in our youngest years, are still living in this life.
A generation has passed within our remembrance. And those who are now young, will, sooner than they suppose, see another generation pass. For dramatic evidence of it, turn back to a school yearbook of three decades or more ago, or turn to an old directory or an old group picture, and see how many already are among the missing.
Thumb through old names in the news and see how many have already gone the way that all men go. A sequence from Hamlet suggests the essence of the subject as the queen said to her brooding son: “Do not forever with thy vailed lids seek for thy noble father in the dust”—to which the king added: “Your father lost a father; that father lost, lost his.”2 These sentences from Shakespeare suggest the swiftly moving mortal scene, the entrance of men from the off stage of the premortal past, across the lighted opening of life, and off into the wings of the eternities to come.
The only rewarding way for mortal man to live is to live for peace and the assurance of eternal life and purpose. The rewarding way of life is to know and do and keep the commandments. The hard way, the unhappy way, is to run counter to conscience and counter to the commandments. The scenes move swiftly; the coarser worldly pleasures satisfy little and last not long.
And as the stage, the setting, and the plots remain essentially the same, the players play brief parts and then move on to eternal scenes and settings, to be assigned the parts that they have prepared themselves to play, according to their deeds and desires.
1Emerson, Essays on Compensation.
2Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2.
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March 21, 1954
Broadcast Number 1,283