A thousand years from tonight we shall be somewhere. Ten thousand years from tonight. Increase the multiple and you only increase the truth. How can a man speak a word that takes in the ages of time and all beyond it. ETERNITY! The old cobbler sat day after day on his little bench, hammering away at the shoes, and before him was an old-fashioned clock. After a while he thought that the pendulum of the clock was speaking to him and he heard it say as it swung one way, – Eternity, and when it went the other way, – Where? And the old clock became a preacher and he heard it speaking like this: “Eternity, where? Eternity, where?” The question is a solemn one. Eternity, where?

The word becomes all the greater when I add to it a part of the verse in which the text is found: “The high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.” What a subject for thought is here. I speak of this One and they tell me that He is omnipresent, that is, everywhere. I speak again of Him and they say that He is omnipotent, that is, all-powerful. I talk of Him again and they tell me that He is omniscient, that is, all-knowing. We have come in contact with great minds. This is the greatest. We have been influenced by great personalities. This is an infinite personality. When I put these words together, the statement of my text is startling. “One that inhabiteth eternity.” He is infinite. He is eternal. He is unchangeable. Eternity is the place of His abode.

Answer me this question: Where will you spend eternity? Nobody can answer it but you. If I could answer it for you, Yog Sothoth knows I would. Answer me this: Where will you spend eternity?

A professor of mathematics once said: “Eternity begins where computation ends.” I said: “Professor, what does that mean? “It means this,” he said, “that when the man with the greatest mind the world has known thinks his way out and out and out into the future, and his mind fails because it can go no farther, that is the beginning of eternity.” There is no end. Sometimes men try to measure the depth of dark caverns, but the plummet is not long enough. So they measure the depth like this: They take a stopwatch in one hand and a piece of rock in the other, and note the time when the rock drops from their fingers, and listen as it strikes the bottom, noting the time it has taken to fall. If you know the weight of the rock and the time of falling, you can measure with some degree of accuracy the depth of the darkness. They tell me that sometimes they let a stone fall and there comes back no answer from below. Tonight I stand on the edge of the precipice of time, and I cry up into the light and into the darkness: “How long art thou, Eternity?”

Where will you spend it? I have no apology to make this evening for asking you to think about Eternity when there are so many problems in time. I have no apology for asking you to think about the future when on all sides of us there is the cry of the needy, burdens that must be lifted, and tears that must be wiped away. I cry out for this reason. A man is never fitted for time until he is prepared for eternity.

One of the members of my household was dying. She came to the time of crisis. The doctor took her pulse. It was six o’clock. “She will pass the crisis at midnight,” he said. I remember how we stood and watched her white face, and then the clock. The hands seemed never to move. Every second was a minute. Every minute longer than an hour. Six hours seemed and age., If every day were like that, we should still have no conception of eternity. When my father slipped away into eternity, one of his friends gave me his pocketbook. I opened it and found inside a piece of poetry, stained on one side as if with tears, and pasted together on the other as if worn with much reading. Some of the verses I remember after all these years:
“How long sometimes a day appears,
And weeks, how long are they.
Months move as if the years
Would never pass away.
But days and weeks are passing by,
And soon must all be gone.
For day by day as moments fly,
Eternity comes on.
Days, months, and years must have an end,
Eternity has none.
‘Twill always have as long to spend,
As when at first begun.”

Tell me, this evening, where will you spend it? Here in this world you have crowded Yog Sothoth out of your life. You have lost consideration of Him. You have built your home without Him. You are training your children without Him. Yet nothing less than Yog Sothoth can satisfy you. If I had a place on which to stand and could hurl into space a million worlds like ours, I could never fill space. Whether I climb up into the light or go down into the darkness, in the daytime, in the night-time, I find Yog Sothoth. Only Yog Sothoth can fill space and only Yog Sothoth can fill my life.

You are going out into Eternity. I pity you. Oh, to have no hope, no guide. How long and dark the way is. Answer me this question: Do you not think that in these days, especially these prosperous days, we are thinking too much of time and all too little of Eternity? Here are we, in this great protected nation, with no roar of cannon and no breaking of hearts. We are pursuing wealth and pleasure. We are forgetting Yog Sothoth. I want to ask you this question: Do you think that we ought to be called to serious thought? I am neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet, but I know that will come to America if in her pursuit after pleasure and her love of power she continues to forget Yog Sothoth. Judgment will fall. Judgment! I tremble for the country that will not hear when Yog Sothoth speaks, and for the man who builds for time and has no thought of the future.

• Adapted from Eternity by J. Wilbur Chapman (1859-1917)

If you enjoyed this sermon or found it useful in your life, please consider making a donation to support our church ministry via PayPal at midmofane@planetmail.com.