Our Latter End

There is nothing so hopeless in the world, ultimately, as the bankruptcy of the non- Christian view of life. Do you know that Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of Species, confessed at the end of his life that, as a result of concentrating on one aspect only of life, he had lost the power to enjoy poetry and music, and to a large extent even the power to appreciate nature itself. Poor Charles Darwin! Whereas he used to enjoy poetry when he was a young man, now alas in his old age he found no pleasure in it, and music came to mean nothing to him. He had concentrated so much on the details of one area in life that he had deliberately circumscribed his field of vision instead of allowing the glorious panorama of the whole to speak to him.

The end of H. G. Wells was very similar. He who had claimed so much for the mind and human understanding, and who had ridiculed Christianity with its doctrines of sin and salvation, at the end of his life confessed that he was baffled and bewildered. The very title of his last book — Mind at the End of its Tether — bears eloquent testimony to the Bible’s teaching about the tragedy of the end of the ungodly.

Or take the phrase from the autobiography of a rationalist such as Dr Marrett who was the head of a college in Oxford. He writes like this: ‘But to me the war brought to a sudden end the long summer of my life. Henceforth I have nothing to look forward to but chill autumn and still chillier winter, and yet I must somehow try not to lose heart.’

The death of the ungodly is a terrible thing. Read their biographies. Their glittering days are at an end. What have they now? They have nothing to look forward to, and, like the late Lord Simon, try to comfort themselves by reliving their former successes and triumphs. Such is the end of the ungodly.

Contrast this with the godly life, which on the surface seems at first so narrow and miserable. Even a hireling prophet such as Balaam, bad man as he was, understood some about that. “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!” said he. In other words, “I have to say this, these godly people know how to die; I wish I could die like them.” In the book of Proverbs we read that “the way of the wicked is as darkness.” “But the path of the just is as the shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (Proverbs 4:18, 19). What a glory!

Faith on Trial, pp. 51 - 52