The joy of finishing and of finishing well! How passionately good people have coveted for themselves that ecstasy! I think of those pathetic entries in Livingstone’s journal. ‘Oh, to finish my work!’ he writes again and again. He is haunted by the vision of the unseen waters, the fountains of the Nile. Will he live to discover them? ‘Oh, to finish!’ he cries; ‘if only I could finish my work!’

I think of Henry Buckle, the author of the History of Civilization. He is overtaken by fever at Nazareth and dies at Damascus. In his delirium he raves continually about his book, his still unfinished book. ‘Oh, to finish my book!’ And with the words, ‘My book! my book!’ upon his burning lips, his spirit slips away.

I think of Henry Martyn sitting amidst the delicious and fragrant shades of a Persian garden, weeping at having to leave the work that he seemed to have only just begun.

I think of Dor © taking a sad farewell of his unfinished Vale of Tears; of Dickens tearing himself from the manuscript that he knew would never be completed; of Macaulay looking with wistful and longing eyes at the History and The Armada that must for ever stand as ‘fragments’; and of a host besides. Life is often represented by a broken column in the churchyard. People long, but long in vain, for the priceless privilege of finishing their work.

The joy of finishing and of finishing well! There is no joy on earth comparable to this. Who is there that has not read a dozen times the immortal postscript that Gibbon added to his Decline and Fall? He describes the tumult of emotion with which, after twenty years of closest application, he wrote the last line of the last chapter of the last volume of his masterpiece. It was a glorious summer’s night at Lausanne. ‘After laying down my pen,’ he says, ‘I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent.’ It was the greatest moment of his life.

We recall, too, the similar experience of Sir Archibald Alison. ‘As I approached the closing sentence of my History o f the Empire,’ he says, ‘I went up to Mrs. Alison to call her down to witness the conclusion, and she saw the last words of the work written, and signed her name on the margin. It would be affectation to conceal the deep emotion that I felt at this event.’

Or think of the last hours of the Venerable Bede. Living away back in the early dawn of our English story—twelve centuries ago—the old man had set himself to translate the Gospel of John into our native speech. Cuthbert, one of his young disciples, has bequeathed to us the touching record. As the work approached completion, he says, death drew on apace. The aged scholar was racked with pain; sleep forsook him; he could scarcely breathe. The young man who wrote at his dictation implored him to desist. But he would not rest. They came at length to the final chapter; could he possibly live till it was done?

‘And now, dear master,’ exclaimed the young scribe tremblingly, ‘only one sentence remains! He read the words and the sinking man feebly recited the English equivalents. ‘It is finished, dear master!’ cried the youth excitedly. ‘Ay, it is finished!’ echoed the dying saint; ‘lift me up, place me at that window of my cell at which I have so often prayed to God. Now glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost!’ And, with these triumphant words, the beautiful spirit passed to its rest and its reward.

The result is that Hudson Taylor became one of the most prodigious toilers of all time. So far from his trust in ‘the Finished Work of Christ’ inclining him to indolence, he felt that he must toil most terribly to make so perfect a Savior known to the whole wide world.

There lies on my desk a Birthday Book which I very highly value. It was given me at the docks by Mr. Thomas Spurgeon as I was leaving England. If you open it at the twenty-first of May you will find these words: “Simply to Thy Cross I cling” is but half of the Gospel. No one is really clinging to the Cross who is not at the same time faithfully following Christ and doing whatsoever He commands’; and against those words of Dr. J. R. Miller’s in my Birthday Book, you may see the autograph of J. Hudson Taylor. He was our guest at the Mosgiel Manse when he set his signature to those striking and significant sentences.

F W Boreham, A Handful of Stars (London: The Epworth Press, 1922), 103-105.