The Great Reality.
I. The moment any heart thoroughly admits a great reality, and takes anything, whether truly or falsely, as a great reality, for that man all life is another thing from what it was before. And all the various opinions, delusions, and mistakes in the world, however numerous, matter no more to one who has a reality than the darkness of a forest to a man on a broad road through it. Such a reality is death. Every one of us in a few years will have left behind him earth, and all belonging to earth. How many doubts would vanish if men began early on the simple plan of trying and testing their doubts and temptations by the great certainty, death, and measuring their lives by the after-death eye? A plain, broad road would show itself amongst the tangle and the wilderness of opinions.
II. Human life in effect, our Lord says in the text, is the way one man treats another. It is the quiet everyday habit of making life more easy to our fellow-creatures that our Blessed Lord judges to be Divine. This is what the calm after-death eye will consider to be real. The service of God has only one primary meaning the service of God is man making others happy. No man is religious who does not strive to make others happy. The prevailing passion of daily life should be: Where is anyone weak and in trouble can I help him? The heart ought to leap to the side of the weak, not to the side of the strong. The heart ought to have a dim feeling that everyone in pain or need is, as it were, Christ on the Cross, and a dread lest the strong, if the strong inflict the pain, are Pilate and Herod with their soldiers. The great realities of the world to come only recognise the principle of making others happy. And I am inclined to think that anyone who takes this into his heart as his reality will not get entangled if he begins early, or feel any difficulty in finding how to do it.
E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons,vol. i., p. 185.