518. May-Day Reflections

May-Day Reflections

Php_4:12 : ’93I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound.’94

Happy Paul! Could you really accommodate yourself to all circumstances in life? Could you go up without pride, and could you come down without exasperation? Teach the same lesson to us all.

We are at a season of the year when vast populations in all our cities are changing residence. Having been born in a house, and having all our lives lived in a house, we do not have full appreciation of what a house is. It is the growth of thousands of years. The human race first lived in clefts of rocks, the beasts of the field moving out of the caverns to let the human race move in. The shepherds and the robbers in some lands still live in caverns of the earth. The troglodytes are savages which to this day prefer the caverns to a house. They are warm, they are large, they are very comfortable, they are less subject to violent changes of heat and cold. We come on along down in the history of the race, and we come to the lodge; which was a home built out of twisted tree branches. We come further on down in the history of the race, and we come to the tent; which was a home built with a round pole in the center and skins of animals reaching out in all directions, mats on the floor for the people to sit on. Time passed on and the world, after much invention, came to build the house; which was a space surrounded by broad stones against which the earth was heaped from the outside. The roof was made of chalk and gypsum and coals and stones and ashes pounded together. After a while the porch was born. After a while the gate. Then hundreds of years passed on, and in the fourteenth century the modern chimney was constructed. The old Hebrews had openings in their houses from which the smoke might escape if it preferred, but there was no inducement offered for it to leave until the modern chimney. Wooden keys opened the door, or the keyhole was large enough to allow the finger to be inserted for the lifting of the latch or the sliding it. There being no windows, the people were dependent for light upon lattice-work, over which a thin veil was drawn down in time of winter to keep out the elements. Window glass was, so late as two or three hundred years ago in England and Scotland, so great a luxury that only the very wealthiest could afford it. A handmill and an oven and a few leathern bottles and some rude pitchers and plates made up the entire equipment of the culinary department.

But the home planted in the old cave, or at the foot of a tent pole, has grown and enlarged and spread abroad until we have the modern house, with its branches and roots, and vast girth and height and depth of comfort and accommodation. Architecture in other days busied itself chiefly in planning and building triumphal arches and basilicas and hippodromes and mausoleums and columns, while they allowed the people for residences to burrow like musk-rats in the earth. St. Sophia, of Constantinople; St. Mark’92s, of Venice; St. Peter’92s, of Rome, are only the Raphaeled walls against which lean the squalor and the pauperism of many nations.

I rejoice that while our modern architects give us grand capitols in which to legislate, and grand court-houses in which to administer justice, and grand churches in which to worship God, they also give much of their time to the planning of comfortable abodes for our tired population. I have not so much interest in the Arch of Titus at Beneventum as I have in the wish that all the people may have a comfortable shelter; nor have I so much interest in the Temple of Jupiter Olympus at Athens as I have in the hope that every man may have an altar for the worship of the true God in his own house. And I have not so much interest in the science of ceramics, which goes crazy over a twisted vase or a queer-handled jug in use three thousand years ago or a pitcher out of which the ancient Pharaohs poured their drunken debauch, as I have that every man have on his table a plate with plenty of healthful food and an appetite to attack it. Thank God for your home’97not merely the house you live in now, but the house you were born in, and the many houses you have resided in since you began your earthly residence. Count over the number of those houses in which you have resided, and you will be surprised. Once in a while you will find a man who lives in the house where he was born and where his father was born and his grandfather was born and his great-grandfather was born; but that is not one out of a thousand cases. I have not been more migratory than most people, but I was amazed when I came to count up the number of residences I have occupied. The fact is, there is in this world no such thing as permanent residence.

In a private vehicle, and not in a rail-car, from which you can see but little, I rode from New York to Yonkers and Tarrytown on the banks of the Hudson’97the finest ride on the planet for a man who wants to see palatial residences in fascinating scenery. It was in the early spring and before the gentlemen of New York had gone out to their country residences. I rode into the grounds of one of these mansions to admire the gardens, and the overseer of the place told me’97and they all told me’97that all the houses had been sold, or that the owners wanted to sell them, and there was literally no exception, although I called at many places, just admiring the gardens and the grounds and the palatial residences. Some wanted to sell, or had sold, because of financial misfortune or because their wives did not want to reside in the summer-time in those places while their husbands tarried in town in the night, always having some business on hand keeping them away. From some houses the people had been shaken out by chills and fever, from some houses they had gone because death or misfortune had occurred, and all those palaces and mansions had either changed occupants or wanted to change.

Take up the city directory of New York and tell me how few families live on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue who lived there fifteen or twenty years ago. Take up the city directory of Brooklyn and tell me how few people live on the Heights or on the Hill who lived there fifteen or twenty years ago. There is no such thing as permanent residence. I saw Monticello, of Virginia, President Jefferson’92s residence, and I saw on the same day Montpelier, which was either Madison’92s or Monroe’92s residence, and I saw also the White House, which was President Taylor’92s residence and President Harrison’92s residence and President Lincoln’92s residence and President Garfield’92s residence. Was it a permanent residence in any case?

I tell you that the race is nomadic, and no sooner gets in one place than it wants to change for another place, or is compelled to change for another place; and so the race invented the railroad and the steamboat in order more rapidly to get into some other place than that in which it was then. Ay, instead of being nomadic, it is immortal, moving on and moving on. We whip up our horses and hasten on until the hub of the front wheel shivers on the tombstone and tips us headlong into the grave, the only permanent earthly residence. But bless God, even that stay is limited, for we shall have a resurrection.

To-morrow the streets will be filled with the furniture carts and the drays and the trucks. It will be a hard day for horses, because they will be overloaded. It will be a hard day for laborers, for they will overlift before they get the family furniture from one house to another. It will be a hard day for housekeepers to see their furniture scratched, and their crockery broken, and their carpets misfit, and their furniture dashed of the sudden showers. It will be a hard day for landlords. It will be a hard day for tenants. Especial grace is needed for moving day. Many a man’92s religion has suffered a fearful strain between the hour on the morning of the first of May when he took his immature breakfast and the hour at night when he rolled into his extemporized couch. The furniture broken sometimes will result in the breaking of one of the ten commandments. There is no more fearful post than the hall of a house where two families meet, one moving out, and the other moving in! The salutation is apt to be more vehement than complimentary. The grace that will be sufficient for the first of January and the first of February and the first of March and the first of April will not be sufficient for the first of May. Say your prayers tomorrow morning if you find nothing better to kneel down by than a coal-scuttle, and say your prayers at night though your knee comes down on a paper of carpet tacks! You will want supernatural help tomorrow if any of you move. Help in the morning to start out aright on the day’92s work. Help at night to repent. There will be enough annoyances to make a Xanthippe out of a Frances Ridley Havergal. I have again and again been in crisis of moving day, and I have stood appalled and amazed and helpless in the shipwreck, taking as well as I could those things that floated ashore from the breakers, and I know how to comfort and how to warn and how to encourage the people; so I preach this practical May-day sermon.

All these troubles will soon be gone, and the bruises will heal and the stiffened joints will become supple and your ruffled temper will be smoothed of its wrinkles and order will take the place of disorder, and you will sit down in your new home seriously to contemplate. My first word, then, in this part of my discourse, is to all those who move out of small houses into larger ones. Now we will see whether, like the apostle, you know how to abound. Do not, because your new house has two more stories than the old one, add two stories to your vanity, or make your brightly-polished door-plate the coffin-plate to your buried humility. Many persons moving into a larger house have become arrogant and supercilious. They swagger where once they walked, they simper where once they laughed, they go about with an air which seems to say, ’93Let all smaller craft get out of these waters if they do not want to be run over by a regular Cunarder.’94 I have known people who were kind and amiable and Christian in their smaller house’97no sooner did they go over the doorsill of the new house than they became a glorified nuisance. They were the terror of dry-goods clerks and the amazement of ferry-boats, into which they swept; and if compelled to stand a moment with condemnatory glance turning all the people seated into criminals and convicts. They began to hunt up the family coat-of-arms, and had lion couchant or unicorn rampant on the carriage door; when if they had the appropriate coat-of-arms it would have been a butter firkin or a shoe-last or a plow or a trowel. Instead of being like all the rest of us, made out of dust, they would have you think that they were trickled out of heaven on a lump of loaf-sugar. The first thing you know of them, the father will fail in business and the daughter will run off with a French dancing-master. A woman spoiled by a finer house is bad enough, but a man so upset is sickening. The lavendered fool goes around so dainty and so precise and so affected in the roil of his eyes or the whirl of his cane or the clicking of the ivory handle against his front teeth or his effeminate languor, and his conversation so interlarded with ’93oh’92s’94 and ’93ah’92s’94 that he is to me a dose of ipecacuanha.

Now, my friends, if you move into a larger house, thank God for more room’97for more room to hang your pictures, for more room in which to gather your friends, for more room in which to let your children romp and play, for more room for great bookcases filled with good reading, or wealth of bric-a-brac. Have as large and as fine a house as you can afford to have, but do not sacrifice your humility and your common sense, do not lose your balance, do not be spoiled by your successes.

Two or three years ago, we were the guests on an English manor. The statuary, the ferneries, the botanical and horticultural genius of the place had done all they could do to make the place attractive. For generations there had been an amassing of plate and costly surroundings. At half-past nine o’92clock in the morning, the proprietor of the estate had the bell rung, and some twenty or thirty men-servants and maid-servants came in to prayers. The proprietor of the estate read the Scriptures, gave out the hymn, started the music, his daughter at the organ, and then the music over, the proprietor of the estate kneeled down and commended all his guests, all his family, all his employees to the Lord Almighty. God can trust such a man as that with a large estate. He knows how to abound. He trusted God and God trusted him. And I could call off the roll of fifty merchant princes as mighty for God as they are mighty in worldly successes. Ah, my friends, do not be puffed up by any of the successes of this life, do not be spoiled by the number of liveried coachmen that may stop at your door, or the sweep of the long trail across the imported tapestry. Many of those who come to your house are fawning parasites. They are not so much in love with you as they are in love with your house and your successes. You move down next year to 320 Low-Water-Mark Street, and see how many of their carriages will halt at your door. Timon of Athens was a wealthy lord, and all the mighty men and women of the land came and sat at his banquet, proud to sit there, and they drank deep to his health. They sent him costly presents. He sent costlier presents back again, and there was no man in all the land so admired as Timon of Athens, the wealthy lord. But after a while, through lavish hospitality, or through betrayal, he lost everything. Then he sent for help to those lords whom he had banqueted and to whom he had given large sums of money, Lucullus, Lucius, Sempronius and Ventidas. Did those lords send any help to him? Oh, no! Lucullus said, when he was applied to, ’93Well, I thought that Timon would come down, he was too lavish; let him suffer for his recklessness.’94 Lucius said, ’93I would be very glad to help Timon, but I have made large purchases and my means are all absorbed.’94 And one lord sent one excuse and another lord sent another excuse. But to the astonishment of everybody, after a while Timon proclaimed another feast. Those lords said to themselves: ’93Why, either Timon has had a good turn of fortune or he has been deceiving us, testing our love.’94 And so they all flocked to the banquet apologetic, for seeming lukewarmness. The guests were all seated at the table, and Timon ordered the covers lifted. The covers lifted, there was nothing under them but smoking hot water. Then Timon said to his guests, ’93Dogs, lap! lap, dogs!’94 and under the terrific irony they fled the room, while Timon pursued them with his anathema, calling them fools of fortune, destroyers of happiness under a mask, hurling at the same time the pitchers and the chalices after them. I would not want to make you oversuspicious in the day of your success, but I want you to understand right well there is a vast difference between the popularity of Timon, the prosperous, and Timon, the unfortunate’97I want you to know there is a vast difference in the number of people who admire a man when he is going up, and the number of people who admire him when he is going down.

But I must have a word with those who in this May-day time move out of larger residences into smaller. Sometimes the pathetic reason is that the family has dwindled in size and so much room is not required, so they move out into smaller apartments. I know there are such cases. Marriage has taken some of the members of the family, death has taken other members of the family, and after a while father and mother wake up to find their family just the size it was when they started, and they would be lonesome and lost in a large house; hence they move out of it.

Moving day is a great sadness to such if they have the law of association dominant. There are the rooms named after the different members of the family. I suppose it is so in all your households. It is so in mine; we name the rooms after the persons who occupy them. And then there is the dining hall where the festivities took place, the holiday festivities; there is the sitting-room where the family met night after night, and there is the room sacred because there a life started or a life stopped; the Alpha and the Omega of some earthly existence. Scene of meeting and parting, of congratulation and heart-break. Every door-knob, every fresco, every mantel, every threshold meaning more to you than it can ever mean to any one else.

When moving out of a house I have always been in the habit, after everything was gone, of going into each room and bidding it a mute farewell. There will be tears running down many cheeks tomorrow that the carmen will not be able to understand. It is a solemn and a touching and an overwhelming thing to leave places forever’97places where we have struggled and toiled and wept and sung and prayed and anxiously watched and agonized. Oh! life is such a strange mixture of honey and of gall, weddings and burials, midnoon and midnight clashing. Every home a lighthouse against which the billows of many seas tumble. Thank God these changes are not always going to continue, otherwise the nerves would give out and the brain would founder on a dementia like that of King Lear when his daughter, Cordelia, came to medicine his domestic calamities.

But there are others who will move out of large residences into smaller through the reversal of fortune. The property must be sold, or the bailiff will sell it, or the income is less and you cannot pay the house rent. First of all, such persons should understand that our happiness is not dependent on the size of the house we live in. I have known people enjoy a small heaven in two rooms and others suffer a pandemonium in twenty. There is as much happiness in a small house as in a large house. There is as much satisfaction under the light of a tallow candle as under the glare of chandelier all the burners at full blaze. Who was the happier, John Bunyan in Bedford Jail, or Belshazzar in the saturnalia? Contentment is something you can neither rent nor purchase. It is not extrinsic, it is intrinsic. Are there fewer rooms in the house to which you move; you will have less to take care of. Is it to be stove instead of furnace? all the doctors say the modern modes of warming buildings are unhealthy. Is it less pier mirrors? Less temptation to your vanity. Is it old-fashioned toilet instead of water pipes all through the house? Less to freeze and burst when you cannot get a plumber. Is it less carriage? More room for robust exercise. Is it less social position? Fewer people who want to drag you down by their jealousies. Is it less fortune to leave in your last will and testament? Less to spoil your children. Is it less money for the marketing? Less temptation to ruin the health of your family with pineapples and indigestible salads. Is it a little deaf? Not hearing so many disagreeables.

I meet you tomorrow at the door of your new home, and while I help you lift the clothes closet over the banisters, and the carman is getting red in the face in trying to transport that article of furniture to some new destination, I congratulate you. You are going to have a better time this year, some of you, than you have ever had. You take God and the Christian religion in your home and you will be grandly happy. God in the parlor’97that will sanctify your sociabilities. God in the nursery’97that will protect your children. God in the dining hall’97that will make the plainest meal an imperial banquet. God in the morning’97that will launch the day brightly from the dry docks. God in the evening’97that will sail the day sweetly into the harbor. And get joy, one and all of you, whether you move or do not move. Get joy out of the thought that we are soon all going to have a grand moving day. Do you want a picture of the new house into which you will move? Here it is, wrought with the hand of a master: ’93We know that, if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’94 How much rent will we have to pay for it? We are going to own it. How much must we pay for it? how much cash down? and how much left on mortgage? Our Father is going to give it as a free gift. When are we going to move into it? We are moving now.

Heads of families are very apt to stay in the old house until they have seen everything off. They send ahead the children and they send ahead the treasures and the valuables. Then after a while they will come themselves. I remember very well in the country that in boyhood moving day was a jubilation. On almost the first load we, the children, were sent on ahead to the new house and we arrived with shout and laughter, and in an hour we had ranged through every room in the house, the barn, and the granary. Toward night, and perhaps in the last wagon, father and mother would come, looking very tired, and we would come down to the foot of the lane to meet them and tell them of all the wonders we discovered in the new place; and then, the last wagon unloaded, the candles lighted, our neighbors who had helped us to move’97for in those times neighbors helped each other’97came in and sat down with us at a table on which there was every luxury they could think of. Well, my dear Lord knows that some of us have been moving a good while. We have sent our children ahead, we have sent many of our valuables ahead, sent many treasures ahead. We cannot go yet. There is work for us to do; but after a while it will be toward night and we will be very tired, and then we will start for our new home; and those who have gone ahead of us, they will see our approach, and they will come down the lane to meet us, and they will, have much to tell us of what they have discovered in the ’93house of many mansions,’94 and of how large the rooms are and of how bright the fountains. And then, the last load unloaded, the table will be spread and our celestial neighbors will come in to sit down with our reunited families, and the chalices will be full, not with the wine that sweats in the vat of earthly intoxication, but with ’93the new wine of the kingdom.’94 And there for the first time we will realize what fools we were on earth when we feared to die, since death has turned out only to be the moving from a smaller house into a larger one, and the exchange of a pauper’92s hut for a prince’92s castle, and the going upstairs from a miserable kitchen to a glorious parlor. Oh! House of God not made with hands, eternal in the heavens!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage