p. 202 | Eternal Life

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 11, 1878

Eternal Life.

A THOUSAND years is a great while—we think a hundred years is long. How venerable things a century old look to us! What changes, little less than miracles, have touched and transformed the country's face within the last hundred years? How márvelously has life peopled our cities, and death our graveyards! What domes of sacred grandeur and temples of sacred worship have risen toward the skies! What splendid names have blazed and gone out! How have the useful arts astonished the world with their mighty growth, and inventive science climbed a higher throne! What records of bloodshed, and what triumphs of peace have been written!

A hundred years! Time long enough for three human generations to pass away, with their shifting costumes and habits of speech. A hundred years! monumental of every human experience in sense or spectacle or sound;

“Pearls of the bridal, and the festive dance, * * * * * Of peasant burial and monarchal march, Of war and famine, tears, blood, and death.”

But when we come to think of a thousand years, we stand before a mountain whose top is lost in the clouds. We catch the sound of the figures, and see their form; but the idea is still far away. We wait for some comparison to impress upon us the first notion of such a vast age. A sense of something tremendous comes over us when we gaze upon a fellow-man who has lived a century.

But what if we could look upon that one man of the race who survived almost a thousand years!—with a memory reaching back over a whole millennium, lacking little more than thirty years,—hoary and awful with the seasons of ten centuries that had snowed upon his hair and whistled through his beard—

“The white old man, seated upon the ground, Clad in his gown of age, the pale white gown, His wrinkled hands Clasping about his knees; old—very old.”

How would the facts and forms of forgotten history move before us in his ancient face! How must the great, deep voice astound us, ringing every counterpoint in the melo-drama of thirty generations!

Then suppose we were to see a man who was immortal. Let him be the great-grandfather of Noah, who never died—who cannot die—come among us in his supernal vigor, the seventh from Adam, to prophesy again of righteousness and judgment—with what a dumb gaze would we consider his stature, shape, and presence! How we would scrutinize his features and complexion! How we would long to question him, or even explore his pulse for the secret of such invulnerable vitality! What aching thoughts of the much he had seen and known must strike our bewildered minds! What a new, strange, overwhelming sense of longevity! We should almost fall down at his feet to worship as the sight of him swept us back

“O'er the broad ocean of the fateful past,”

and made us feel the contrast of our own ephemeral littleness.

It is in such a life-picture, be it of translated patriarch, or dying child, that we get some faint idea of the venerableness, the lasting fullness and luster of eternal life. No. Methuselah, with all the grandeur of his ten centuries, could be so highly honored and brightly blessed as the saint of fewest earthly years whose life is hid with Christ in God, and who will have part in the first resurrection.

“When we've been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise Than when we first begun.” —Sel.