287. Blessings of Short Life

Blessings of Short Life

Isa_57:1 : ’93The righteous is taken away from the evil to come.’94

We all spend much time in panegyric of longevity. We consider it a great thing to live to be an octogenarian. If any one dies in youth we say, ’93What a pity!’94 Dr. Muhlenberg in old age said that the hymn written in early life by his own hand no more expressed his sentiment when it said:

I would not live alway.

If one be pleasantly circumstanced he never wants to go. William Cullen Bryant, the great poet, at eighty-two years of age standing in my house in a festal group, reading ’93Thanatopsis’94 without spectacles, was just as anxious to live as when at eighteen years of age he wrote that immortal threnody. Cato feared at eighty years of age that he would not live to learn Greek. Monaldesco, at one hundred and fifteen years writing the history of his time, feared a collapse. Theophrastus, writing a book at ninety years of age, was anxious to live to complete it. Thurlow Weed at about eighty-six years of age found life as great a desirability as when he snuffed out his first politician. Albert Barnes so well prepared for the next world, at seventy said he would rather stay here. So it is all the way down. I suppose that the last time that Methuselah was out-of-doors in a storm he was afraid of getting his feet wet lest it shorten his days.

Indeed, I have some time ago preached a sermon on the blessings of longevity, but on this, the last Sabbath of the year, and when many are filled with sadness at the thought that another chapter of their life is closing, and that they have three hundred and sixty-five days less to live, I propose to preach to you about the blessings of an abbreviated earthly existence.

If I were an agnostic I would say a man is blessed in proportion to the number of years he can stay on terra firma, because after that he falls off the docks, and if he is ever picked out of the depths it is only to be set up in some morgue of the universe to see if anybody will claim him. If I thought God made man only to last forty or fifty or a hundred years, and then he was to go into annihilation, I would say his chief business ought to be to keep alive and even in good weather to be very cautious, and to carry an umbrella and take overshoes and life preservers and bronze armor and weapons of defense lest he fall off into nothingness and obliteration. But you are not agnostics. You believe in immortality and the eternal residence of the righteous in heaven, and therefore I first remark that an abbreviated earthly existence is to be desired, and is a blessing because it makes one’92s life-work very compact.

Some men go to business at seven o’92clock in the morning and return at seven in the evening. Others go at eight o’92clock and return at twelve. Others go at ten and return at four. I have friends who are ten hours a day in business, others who are five hours, others who are one hour. They all do their work well; they do their entire work and then they return. Which position do you think the most desirable? You say, other things being equal, the man who is the shortest time detained in business and who can return home the quickest is the most blessed. There is a quaint old verse which expresses the idea:

Our life is but a winter’92s day:

Some early breakfast and away;

Others to dinner stay and are full fed.

The oldest man but sups and goes to bed.

Large is his debt who lingers out the day;

He that goes soonest has the least to pay.

Now why not carry that good sense into the subject of transference from this world? If a person die in childhood, he gets through his work at nine o’92clock in the morning. If he die at forty-five years of age, he gets through his work at twelve o’92clock noon. If he die at seventy years of age, he gets through his work at five o’92clock in the afternoon. If he die at ninety, he has to toil all the way on up to eleven o’92clock at night. The sooner we get through our work the better. The harvest all in barrack or barn, the farmer does not sit down in the stubble field, but shouldering his scythe and taking his pitcher from under the tree he makes a straight line for the old homestead. All we want to be anxious about is to get our work done and well done, and the quicker the better.

Again, there is a blessing in an abbreviated earthly existence in the fact that moral disaster might come upon the man if he tarried longer. Lately a man who had been prominent in churches, and who had been admired for his generosity and kindness everywhere, for forgery was sent to State prison for fifteen years. Twenty years ago there was no more probability of that man’92s committing a commercial dishonesty than that you will commit commercial dishonesty. The number of men who fall into ruin between fifty and seventy years of age is simply appalling. If they had died thirty years before it would have been better for them and better for their families. The shorter the voyage the less chance for a cyclone.

There is a wrong theory abroad that if one’92s youth be right his old age will be right. You might as well say there is nothing wanting for a ship’92s safety except to get it fully launched on the Atlantic Ocean. I have sometimes asked those who were schoolmates or collegemates of some great defaulter. ’93What kind of a boy was he? What kind of a young man was he?’94 and they have said, ’93Why, he was a splendid fellow; I had no idea he could ever commit such an outrage.’94 The fact is the great temptation of life sometimes comes far on in mid-life or in old age. The first time I crossed the Atlantic Ocean it was as smooth as a mill-pond and I thought the sea-captains and the voyagers had slandered the old ocean, and I wrote home an essay for a magazine on ’93The Smile of the Sea,’94 but I never afterward could have written that thing, for before we got home we got a terrible shaking up. The first voyage of life may be very smooth; the last may be a Euroclydon. Many who start life in great prosperity do not end it in prosperity.

The great pressure of temptation comes sometimes in this direction: at about forty-five years of age, a man’92s nervous system changes, and some one tells him he must take stimulants to keep himself up, and he takes stimulants to keep himself up, until the stimulants keep him down; or a man has been going along for thirty or forty years in unsuccessful business, and here is an opening where by one dishonorable act he can lift himself and lift his family from all financial embarrassment. He attempts to leap the chasm and he falls into it.

Then it is in after-life that the great temptation of success comes. If a man make a fortune before thirty years of age, he generally loses it before forty. The solid and the prominent fortunes, for the most part, do not come to their climax until in mid-life or in old age. The most of the bank presidents have white hair. The vast majority of those who have been largely successful have been flung of arrogance or worldliness or dissipation in old age. They may not have lost their integrity; but they have become so worldly and so selfish under the influence of large success that it is evident to everybody that their success has been a temporal calamity and an eternal damage. Concerning many people it may be said it seems as if it would have been better if they could have embarked from this life at twenty or thirty years of age. Do you know the reason why the vast majority of people die before thirty? It is because they have not the moral endurance for that which is beyond the thirty, and a merciful God will not allow them to be put to the fearful strain.

Again, there is a blessing in an abbreviated earthly existence in the fact that one is the sooner taken off the defensive. As soon as one is old enough to take care of himself, he is put on his guard. Bolts on the door to keep out the robbers. Fire-proof safes to keep off the flames. Life-insurance and fire-insurance against accident. Receipts lest you have to pay a debt twice. Life-boat against shipwreck. Westinghouse air-brake against railroad collision, and hundreds of hands ready to overreach you and take all you have. Defense against cold, defense against heat, defense against sickness, defense against the world’92s abuse, defense all the way down to the grave, and even a tombstone sometimes is not a sufficient barricade.

If the soldier who has been on guard, shivering and stung with the cold, pacing up and down the parapet with shouldered musket, is glad when some one comes to relieve guard and he can go inside the fortress, ought not that man shout for joy who can put down his weapon of earthly defense and go into the King’92s castle? Who is the more fortunate, the soldier who has to stand guard twelve hours, or the man who has to stand guard six hours? We have common sense about everything but religion, common sense about everything but transference from this world.

Again, there is a blessing in an abbreviated earthly existence in the fact that one escapes so many bereavements. The longer we live the more attachments and the more kindred, the more chords to be wounded or rasped or sundered. If a man live on to seventy or eighty years of age, how many graves are cleft at his feet! In that long reach of time father and mother go, brothers and sisters go, children go, grandchildren go, personal friends outside the family circle whom they had loved with a love like that of David and Jonathan. Beside that, some men have a natural trepidation about dissolution, and ever and anon during forty or fifty or sixty years, this horror of their dissolution shudders through soul and body. Now, suppose the lad goes at sixteen years of age? He escapes fifty funerals, fifty caskets, fifty obsequies, fifty awful wrenchings of the heart. It is hard enough for us to bear their departure, but is it not easier for us to bear their departure than for them to stay and bear fifty departures? Shall we not by the grace of God rouse ourselves into a generosity of bereavement which will practically say, ’93It is hard enough for me to go through this bereavement; but how glad I am that he will never have to go through it.’94

So I reason with myself, and so you will find it helpful to reason with yourselves. David lost his son. Though David was king, he lay on the earth mourning and inconsolable for some time. At this distance of time, which do you really think was the one to be congratulated, the short-lived child or the long-lived father? Had David died as early as that child died he would, in the first place, have escaped that particular bereavement; then he would have escaped the worst bereavement of Absalom, his recreant son, and the pursuit of the Philistines and the fatigues of his military campaign and the jealousy of Saul and the perfidy of Ahithophel and the curse of Shimei and the destruction of his family at Ziklag; and above all, he would have escaped the two great calamities of his life, the great sins of uncleanness and murder. David lived to be of vast use to the Church and the world, but so far as his own happiness was concerned does it not seem to you that it would have been better for him to have gone early?

Now, this explains some things that to you have been inexplicable. This shows you why when God takes little children from a household, he is very apt to take the brightest, the most genial, the most sympathetic, the most talented. Why? It is because that kind of nature suffers the most when it does suffer, and is most liable to temptation. God saw the tempest sweeping up from the Caribbean, and he put the delicate craft into the first harbor. ’93Taken away from the evil to come.’94

Again, there is a blessing in an abbreviated earthly existence in the fact that it puts one sooner in the center of things. All astronomers, infidel as well as Christian, agree in believing that the universe swings around some great center. Any one who has studied the earth, and studied the heavens, knows that God’92s favorite figure in geometry is a circle. When God put forth his hand to create the universe, he did not strike that hand at right angles, but he waved it in a circle and kept on waving it in a circle until systems and constellations and galaxies and all worlds took that motion. Our planet swinging around the sun, other planets swinging around other suns, but somewhere a great hub around which the great wheel of the universe turns. Now, the center is heaven; that is the capital of the universe’97the great metropolis of immensity. Does not our common sense teach us that, in matters of study, it is better for us to move out from the center toward the circumference, rather than to be on the circumference where our world now is? We are like those who study the American Continent while standing on the Atlantic beach. The way to study the continent is to cross it, or go to the heart of it. Our standpoint in this world is defective. We are at the wrong end of the telescope. The best way to study a piece of machinery is not to stand on the doorstep and try to look in, but to go in with the engineer and take our place right amid the saws and the cylinders. We wear out our eyes and our brain from the fact that we are studying under such great disadvantage. Millions of dollars for observatories to study things about the moon, about the sun, about the rings of Saturn, about transits and occultations and eclipses, simply because our studio, our observatory, is poorly situated. We are down in the cellar trying to study the palace of the universe, while our departed Christian friends have gone upstairs amid the skylights to study.

Now, when one can sooner get to the center of things, is he not to be congratulated? Who wants to be always in the freshman class? We study God in this world by the Biblical photograph of him; but we all know we can in five minutes of interview with a friend get a more accurate idea of him than we can by studying him fifty years through pictures or words. The little child that died at six months of age, today knows more of God than all Andover and all Princeton and all New Brunswick and all Edinburgh and all the theological institutions in Christendom. Is it not better to go up to the very headquarters of knowledge? Does not our common sense teach us that it is better to be at the center than to be clear out on the rim of the wheel, holding nervously fast to the tire, lest we be suddenly hurled into light and eternal felicity? Through all kinds of optical instruments trying to peer in through the cracks and the keyholes of heaven’97afraid that both doors of the celestial mansion will be swung wide open before our entranced vision’97rushing about among the apothecary shops of this world, wondering if this is good for rheumatism and that is good for neuralgia and something else is good for a bad cough, lest we be suddenly ushered into a land of everlasting health, where the inhabitant never says, ’93I am sick.’94

What fools we all are to prefer the circumference to the center. What a dreadful thing it would be if we should be suddenly ushered from this wintry world into the Maytime orchards of heaven, and if our pauperism of sin and sorrow should be suddenly broken up by a presentation of an emperor’92s castle surrounded by parks with spring fountains and paths up and down which angels of God walk two and two. We are like persons standing on the cold steps of the National Picture Gallery in London, under umbrella in the rain, afraid to go in amid the Turners and the Titians and the Raphaels. I come to them and say, ’93Why don’92t you go inside the gallery?’94 ’93Oh,’94 they say, ’93we don’92t know whether we can get in.’94 I say, ’93Don’92t you see the door is open?’94 ’93Yes,’94 they say, ’93but we have been so long on these cold steps, we are so attached to them we don’92t like to leave.’94 ’93But,’94 I say, ’93it is so much brighter and more beautiful in the gallery, you had better go in.’94 ’93No,’94 they say, ’93we know exactly how it is out here, but we don’92t know exactly how it is inside.’94 So we stick to this world as though we preferred cold drizzle to warm habitation, discord to cantata, sackcloth to royal purple’97as though we preferred a piano with four or five of the keys out of tune to an instrument fully attuned’97as though earth and heaven had exchanged apparel, and earth had taken on bridal array and heaven had gone into deep mourning, all its waters stagnant, all its harps broken, all chalices cracked at the dry wells, all the lawns sloping to the river plowed with graves with dead angels under the furrow. I want to break up my own infatuation and I want to break up your infatuation with this world. If we are ready, and if our work is done, the sooner we go the better, and if there are blessings in longevity I want you to know right well there are also blessings in an abbreviated earthly existence.

If the spirit of this sermon is true, how consoled you ought to feel about members of your family that went early. ’93Taken from the evil to come,’94 this book says. What a fortunate escape they had! How glad we ought to feel that they will never have to go through the struggles which we have had to go through. They had just time enough to get out of the cradle and run up on the springtime hills of this world and see how it looked, and then they started for a better stopping-place. They were like ships that put in at St. Helena, staying there long enough to let passengers go up and see the barracks of Napoleon’92s captivity, and then hoist sail for the port of their own native land. They only took this world in transitu. It is hard for us, but it is blessed for them. And if the spirit of this sermon is true, then we ought not to go around sighing and groaning because another year has gone; but we ought to go down on one knee by the milestone and see the letters and thank God that we are three hundred and sixty-five miles nearer home. We ought not to go around with morbid feelings about our health or about anticipated demise. We ought to be living not according to that old maxim which I used to hear in my boyhood, that you must live as though every day were the last; you must live as though you were to live forever, for you will. Do not be nervous lest you have to move out of a shanty into an Alhambra.

One Christmas day I witnessed something very thrilling. We had just distributed the family presents Christmas morning, when I heard a great cry of distress in the hallway. A child from a neighbor’92s house came in to say her father was dead. It was only three doors off, and I think in two minutes we were there. There lay the old Christian sea-captain, his face upturned toward the window as though he had suddenly seen the headlands, and with an illuminated countenance as though he were just going into harbor. The fact was he had already got through the ’93Narrows.’94 In the adjoining room were the Christmas presents waiting for his distribution. Long ago, one night when he had narrowly escaped with his ship from being run down by a great ocean steamer, he had made his peace with God, and a kinder neighbor or a better man you would not find this side of heaven. Without a moment’92s warning, the pilot of the heavenly harbor had met him just off the lightship.

He had often talked to me of the goodness of God, and especially of a time when he was about to go in New York harbor with his ship from Liverpool, and he was suddenly impressed that he ought to put back to sea. Under the protest of the crew and under their very threat he put back to sea, fearing at the same time he was losing his mind, for it did seem so unreasonable that when they could get into harbor that night they should put back to sea. But they put back to sea and the captain said to his mate, ’93You call me at ten o’92clock at night.’94 At twelve o’92clock at night the captain was aroused and said: ’93What does this mean? I thought I told you to call me at ten o’92clock, and here it is twelve.’94 ’93Why,’94 said the mate, ’93I did call you at ten o’92clock, and you got up, looked around and told me to keep right on this same course for two hours, and then to call you at twelve o’92clock.’94 Said the captain, ’93Is it possible? I have no remembrance of that.’94 At twelve o’92clock the captain went on deck and through the rift of the cloud the moonlight fell upon the sea and showed him a shipwreck with one hundred struggling passengers. He helped them off. Had he been any earlier or any later at that point of the sea he would have been of no service to those drowning people. On board the captain’92s vessel they began to band together as to what they should pay for the rescue and what they should pay for the provisions. ’93Ah,’94 says the captain, ’93my lads, you can’92t pay me anything; all I have on board is yours; I feel too greatly honored of God in having saved you to take any pay.’94 Just like him. He never got any pay except that of his own applauding conscience.

Oh, that the old sea-captain’92s God might be my God and yours! Amid the stormy seas of this life may we have always some one as tenderly to take care of us as the captain took care of the drowning crew and the passengers. And may we come into the harbor with as little physical pain and with as bright a hope as he had, and if it should happen to be a Christmas morning when the presents are being distributed and we are celebrating the birth of him who came to save our shipwrecked world, all the better; for what grander, brighter Christmas present could we have than heaven?

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage