The Leaves are Falling by Dr F W Boreham

A reflection on the season of Autumn and the autumn of our lives.

“if, in the whole world, there is anything more exhilarating and delectable than an Australian Autumn, I should dearly love to sample it.”

Autumn is with us again; and, of all the seasons, Autumn is, in many respects the most beautiful. The leaves of the lime are tinged with amber; spots of lemon colour appear upon the silver birch; and a soft suspicion of gold sweeps across the fern. As though beneath a wizard’s wand, the hedgerows become bronze and purple and saffron; and the furze on the moorland sparkles in the early morning with the dew-drenched webs of innumerable spiders.

I.
Of all the seasons, Autumn has most often been misunderstood and misinterpreted. The minstrels who have undertaken to sing the songs of Autumn have almost invariably set their music in a minor key. Autumn they have told us, is the twilight of the year; Autumn is sunset; Autumn is decline and decrepitude; Autumn is the season at which things make haste to die. There are reams of this kind of thing.

I am sorry, very sorry, I have spent most of my Autumn here in Australia; and if, in the whole world, there is anything more exhilarating and delectable than an Australian Autumn, I should dearly love to sample it. Yet, in the southern lands, Nature never splashes on her spacious canvas with such abandon as she shows in the dear Homeland. There the pageantry of Autumn is one gorgeous colour-scheme. And shall I ever forget an Autumn that I spent in Canada? When the maples round the great lakes don their rich scarlet, bronze and wine-coloured attire,  it really seems as if Nature has flung all restraints to the winds and is bent upon a few weeks of hectic gaiety!

“When the maples round the great lakes don their rich scarlet, bronze and wine-coloured attire,  it really seems as if Nature has flung all restraints to the winds and is bent upon a few weeks of hectic gaiety!”

Autumn means golden harvest fields and the garnering of luscious fruit. The year comes to its own in the Autumn. Similarly, a man in the autumn of life is, in many respects, at his very best. A softening of life‘s asperities, a mellowing of life’s more turbulent passions, a quickness to see the best in others, may be expected to mark his intellectual development.

In youth and earlier manhood, he watched with suspicion and with something akin to hatred, the rise and progress of his rivals. He was jealous – naturally jealous – of every young upstart who threatened to do a little bit better than he himself was doing. He was fighting for his own hand and could not afford to give quarter or show mercy. But when autumn comes, he feels differently. He has won his place – or lost it. Life has taken shape and is unlikely to be greatly modified either for weal or for woe.

Instead of feeling resentful of aspirations and audacities of younger men, he views their activities with lively interest and genial admiration. Instead of deriding and belittling their efforts, he rather cheers them on and even offers them a hand. He likes to get them to his fireside; gives them the rich autumnal fruitage of his own experience; and tries to make the struggle a little easier for them than it has been for him.

In the autumn of life a man’s judgement becomes kindlier; his temperament becomes sweeter; his character takes on a winsomeness that it has never before revealed.

Autumn is a forward-looking festival. Autumn tells us never to despair. The world’s loveliest springtimes are being woven out of the tissue of Autumn’s discarded web. Our most glorious triumphs shall yet emerge from our most devastating defeats. Gethsemane and Calvary are but the divine preparation for the wonder of the Resurrection, the splendour of the Ascension and the transports of Eternity.

II.
Silently and imperceptibly, season melts into season as, today, Summer melts into Autumn.  Such transitions present us with the most intriguing illusion that the solar system can boast – the illusion of futility. Like a gigantic wheel, the cycle of the seasons revolves, without, apparently, achieving anything by its revolutions.

Just as the cycle of the day – morning, afternoon, evening, night – brings us back to the  dawn from which we started, a dawn that differs from the myriad dawns that preceded it, so the cycle of the year – Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – brings us once more to the vernal season, and we find the buds bursting and the birds nesting just as they have done since the world began. It looks like change for the sheer sake of change, growth for the sake of growth, movement for the sheer sake of movement. But is it?

Paul Dombey asked why the wheels of the clock went round. This question is pertinent.  A child cannot conceive of purposeless movement. If he sees a wheel turning, he immediately assumes that some purpose is served by its gyrations. The child’s conviction is rooted in a sure and profound instinct. He vaguely feels, and is right in feeling, that things do not change for the sake of changing.  We have all watched with pity the actions of a very nervous man as he rises from his chair, moves about the room, sits here and sits there without point or purpose, and eventually returns to the chair from which he started. He simply cannot be still.  Are we living in a neurasthenic universe? Are the movements that we witness the twists, twirls and twitches of things that have lost the secret of repose?

He who probes beneath the surface will soon discover that, notwithstanding the illusion of purposelessness in Nature, high ends are being compassed. The wheels are not wild wheels.  Nature knows what she is doing. Every revolution of a wheel brings her nearer to her goal. She is grinding out the week and the worthless things that litter the planet in order that sturdier and more valuable types may take their places. She is improving her wondrous web by every spin of the wheels. 

One of the classics of the last generation was Louis Figuier’s “The World Before the Deluge,” the illustrations of which so captivated the imagination of George Gissing. Many a boy has pored spellbound, over those absorbing prints. They represent monstrous creatures of ungainly bulk, thick hide, and awkward movement, dragging their sluggish length about a planet that they neither serve nor adorned.  But the wheels have revolved, and by the turning, Nature has immeasurably improved upon these prentice efforts of hers.

The contrast between Figuier’s planet and our own represents the most sensational transformation scene ever witnessed. Brute force yielded to brain force. There arose the smaller orders. They were creatures of supple sinew and lithe movement, creatures of quick wit and agile limbs.  They had the cunning to bond themselves together in herds, troops, and packs. Outmatched at every point, the ponderous monsters of the primitive period vanished from the face of the earth. The giants were destroyed by the pygmies.

The wheels were going round – morning, afternoon; evening, night.  Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter! Cycle followed cycle, and revolution followed revolution. But Nature was improving her products and making starting progress all the time. Behind the visible wheels were the invisible works; and behind the invisible works, was a definite and stately purpose.

 III.
The generations come and go. The wheels revolve. Childhood grows to youth, youth to maturity, maturity to age; and age is surrounded by childhood again. But we must not be tricked by appearances. The baby born this morning is born a little older than any baby ever bought born before. His childish appearance and infantile behaviour are mere subterfuge and camouflage –  the kind of thing in which many people indulge who would have us believe that they are younger than they really are. In fact, by the time that a man reaches babyhood; he has about fifty centuries to his credit. There is such a thing as race memory.

The cunning of animals is the result of the accumulated experience of countless generations.  Creatures that are hunted generation after generation inherit a legacy of caution; they are born sly. If this be true of beasts, it is still truer of man. To a superficial observer, the history of humanity appears to be a mere turning of the wheels.  But the wheels are working. Each generation carries the race a little nearer to its destiny. Like Nature herself, each generation does something towards the elimination of the ancient evil; each contributes something towards the final victory of the good. The wheels go round, but they do not spin in vain.

The principle applies to the individual. We each make our way from our first childhood to our second, and in the simplicities of old age, the wheel seems to have turned, full cycle, to it starting point.  But, with the whirling of the wheels, something has been achieved. A character has been formed; a soul has been fashioned. For weal or for woe, we are all in the making. The exact nature of the finished product depends entirely on intellectual and spiritual controls within our own grasp.

The issue is shaped by the tastes we form, the friends we choose, the ideals we cherish, the faith we follow. But, however we may apply the master-mechanism that is making us, the fact remains that the apparently purposeless wheels are refashioning and re-creating us all the time. 

With tired eyes we turn from this bewildering hurricane of change to contemplate a revelation of the changeless – ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday today and forever’. And yet, in a sense, the changeless Christ does change. There is a change that is the prerogative of perfection. For perfection is never perfection in itself.  Perfection is always on the march. There is a far-away look in its eye. Perfection is invariably struggling towards perfection. The perfect bud is aspiring to become the perfect blossom: the perfect lamb is the foreshadowing of the perfect sheep: the perfect baby is but the promise of the perfect man.  At any rate, the changeless Christ changes to me. His lustre is enhanced as my appreciation and appropriation of Him develop.

Or perhaps it is with Him as with so many other things. Seen at a distance, they seem tiny: seem close at hand, they appear tremendous.  There was a time when, like Peter, I followed afar off. In those days He seemed relatively insignificant. But as He draws me nearer to Himself, He grows in grandeur and in grace.

But, whatever the explanation of the phenomenon, the fact remains. To those who love, worship and serve him, the changeless Christ does change. Every day his name becomes more melodious; every day his redeeming blood becomes more unutterably precious; every day His mystical presence becomes more enjoyable; every day His divine Person becomes more adorable; every day His regal sway become more absolute, and every day His wise and wondrous words become more pregnant with subtle and sublime significance. 

There is a sense in which the kaleidoscope itself never changes. The component parts remain perpetually the same. Between the forming of one lovely mosaic and the forming of another, nothing is taken away and nothing is added. The same constituents, without inherent change, assume new and unsuspected forms of beauty. And so does He!