To-Morrow by Seb.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 6, 1875

To-Morrow.

By Seb.

If everybody should do “to-morrow” all he promised to do, the millennium would commence at once. The world would then be a paradise. “Hell,” says an old proverb, “is paved with good intentions.” So is to-morrow—paved, and thickly paved, with them. We have never yet known a person who did not intend to do some good or great thing to-morrow. Not to-day, mind you—which is the best time to do nearly everything—but to-morrow. To-day is too near. To-day calls for immediate exertion. To-day suggests “indecent haste.” To-day precludes reflection. To-day we have something else to think of. To-day is no day at all. But to-morrow, we are ready, all of us, for anything. To-morrow we will work wonders. To-morrow we will do what ought to have been done yesterday, which might have been done to-day, but which to-morrow must be done.

So hurrah for to-morrow! This is the cry of the world—Hurrah for to-morrow! We are all ready to leave off drinking to-morrow; to pay our debts to-morrow; to begin a new life to-morrow; everything to-morrow, but nothing to-day. To-day is too soon for anything; that is to say, for anything good. We will do our bad things to-day, and our good things to-morrow. We are all glib enough in quoting the Scripture text: “Now is the accepted time,” but putting it into practice is another matter. That we leave to our neighbors who, in turn, leave it to us. Thus it is, the great vice of communities and of all individuals is procrastination, which is not only the “thief of time,” as Dr. Young has it, but the thief of everything—the thief of thieves.

The poet Dryden, reflecting on this tendency to put off everything till to-morrow, exclaims bitterly:—

“When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat, Yet fooled with hope, men favor the deceit, Trust on and think to-morrow will repay; To-morrow’s falser than the former day, Dies worse, and while it says we shall be blest, With some new joys, cuts off what we possess.”

The same poet, writing in a more cheerful strain, expresses himself thus:—

“Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call to-day his own, He who, secure within, can say, To-morrow do thy worst! for I have lived to-day.”

We might fill this whole column with extracts from poets, philosophers, and prophets, warning us against this terrible vice—this all but crime—of deferring our good deeds until to-morrow. The Bible is full of such warnings. Moreover, we have examples of its disastrous effects all around us—examples, not only in the moral world, but in the material world. Enough of the products of the soil, for instance, are destroyed every year by procrastination, to feed the whole human race.

And so in all departments of life. The farmer neglects his farm; the merchant neglects his store; the lawyer neglects his clients; the doctor neglects his patients; the mechanic neglects his work; the house-wife, her house—and all from this insane idea that to-morrow will set everything right.

But for weakening their faith in a future state, we should be tempted to teach our children that there is absolutely no such thing as to-morrow. We would blot the very word out of existence. In the large sense of things there is, in fact, no to-morrow. Our life on earth is but one long or short to-day. And in His eyes with whom a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, eternity itself is but an everlasting now.

One thing, at any rate, is certain, namely, that, taking the common view of to-morrow, no one of us is sure ever to see another; and so long as—

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this pretty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time”—

no living soul can be sure to see another. Wherefore saith Congreve:—

“Defer not till to-morrow to be wise; To-morrow’s sun to thee may never rise.”

If children were brought up from their infancy with this lesson constantly before their eyes—in words, at least, if not in deeds—it would save the world a vast deal of trouble, pain, waste, and mischief. It is a lesson that should be inscribed on the walls of every nursery, every school-house, every work-shop, and every church, in the land. Dr. Young’s famous verse upon it—which seems hardly so familiar to the present generation as it was to the past—should be committed to memory, and cited and recited in all our families, and all our academies until its words are branded, as it were, on the brain. Just peruse them, now, good reader, and learn them by heart, if not by heart. They are not often quoted correctly, but here they are in authentic shape. They were written a hundred and thirty years ago, and are from the first part of “The Complaint, or Night Thoughts.”

“Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer; Next day, the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on till wisdom is pushed out of life. Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene. If not so frequent, would not this be strange? That ’tis so frequent, this is stranger still.” —Seb.