202. A Tale Told; or, the Passing Years

A Tale Told; or, the Passing Years

Psa_90:9 : ’93We spend our years as a tale that is told.’94

The Israelites were forty years in the wilderness, and during thirty-eight years of the forty nothing is recorded of them; and, I suppose, no other emigrants had a duller or more uninteresting time than they had. So they got to telling stories’97stories concerning themselves or concerning others; stories about the brick-kilns of Egypt, where they had toiled in slavery; stories about how the waters of the Red Sea piled up into palisades at their crossing; story of the lantern hung in the heavens to guide them by night; story of ibises destroying the reptiles of the wilderness; stories of personal encounter. It must have been an awful thing to have had nothing to do for thirty-eight years, except to get lost every time they tried to escape from the wilderness. So they whiled away the time in story-telling. Indeed, there were persons whose one business was to narrate stories, and they were paid by such trifles as they could pick up from the surrounding listeners. To such instances, our text refers when it says: ’93We spend our years as a tale that is told.’94

At this tremendous passage from the year 1899 to the year 1900, it will do us all good to consider that our whole life is a story told’97a good story or a bad story; a tragic story or a mirthful story; a wise story or a foolish story; a clean story or a filthy story; a story of success or a story of failure. ’93We spend our years as a tale that is told.’94

In the first place I remark that every person’92s life is a very interesting story. My text does not depreciate ’93a tale that is told.’94 We have all of us been entertained by the story-teller when snowbound in the rail-train; or in the group on a winter’92s night in the farmhouse; or gathered around a blazing hearth, with some hunters at the mountain inn. Indeed, it is a praiseworthy art to impersonate a good story well. If you doubt the practical and healthful and inspiring use of such a story, take down from the library Washington Irving’92s Tales of a Traveler, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’92s Twice Told Tales. But as interesting as any of these would be the story of many an obscure life, if the tale were as well told. Why do we all like biographies and autobiographies? Because they are stories of eminent human lives. But the story of the life of a backwoodsman, of a man who looks stupid, of one about whom you never heard a word, must be just as thrilling on a small scale as on a large scale is a life of a Cyrus or a C’e6sar or a Pizarro or a Mark Antony or a Charlemagne or the late General Gordon, who was upon a parapet leading his soldiers with nothing but a stick in his hand, and his troops cried: ’93Gordon, come down; you will be killed.’94 But he did not come down, and one of the soldiers said: ’93It is all right. He don’92t mind being killed. He is one of those blessed Christians.’94

If you get the confidence of that very plain man just come out of the backwoods, and can induce him to give the stirring experiences of his life, he will tell you that which will make your blood curdle and your hair stand on end. That night when a panther disputed his pathway on the way home. That landslide, when the mountains seemed about to come down on his cabin. That accident to his household and no surgeon within fifteen miles. That long storm that shut them in, and the food was exhausted. That contest at his doorway with bandits, who thought there might be within something worth taking. That death-bed, with no one but himself to count the fluttering pulses.

As Oliver Cromwell, on the anniversary of his greatest victory, followed his darling daughter to the grave, so in the humblest and most unpretending life there has been a commingling of gladness and gloom, of triumph and despair. Nothing that David Garrick ever enacted at Drury Lane Theater in the way of tragedy, or Charles Matthews ever played in Covent Garden in the way of comedy, excelled things which on a small scale have been seen in the life of obscure men and women. Many a profound and learned sermon has put the audience to sleep, while some man whose phraseology could not be parsed, and whose attire was cut and fitted and made up by plainest housewife, has told the story of his life in a way that melted the prayer-circle into tears as easily as a warm April sun dissolves the snow of the previous night.

Oh, yes, while ’93we spend our years as a tale that is told,’94 it is an interesting story. It is the story of an immortal, and that makes it interesting. He is launched on an ocean of eternal years, in a voyage that will never terminate. He is striking the keynote of an anthem or a dirge that will never come to its last bar. That is what makes the devotional meetings of modern times so much more interesting than they used to be. They are filled not with discourses by laymen on the subject of justification and sanctification, which lay-discourses administer more to the facetious than to the edifying, but with stories of what God has done for the soul: how everything suddenly changed; how the promises became balsamic in times of laceration; how he was personally helped out and helped up and helped on! Nothing can stand before such a story of personal rescue, personal transformation, personal illumination. The mightiest and most skilful argument against Christianity collapses under the ungrammatical but sincere statement. The atheistic professor of natural philosophy goes down under the story of that backwoodsman’92s conversion.

All that elaborate persuasion of the old folks of the folly of giving up active life too soon means nothing as compared with the simple incident you may relate to them of the fact that Benjamin Franklin was governor of Pennsylvania at eighty-two years of age, and that Dandolo of Venice at ninety years of age, although his eyesight had been destroyed through being compelled by his enemies to look into a polished metal basin under the full blaze of the sun until totally blind; yet this sightless nonogenarian leading an army to the successful besiegement of Constantinople! When an old man hears of such incidents he puts aside his staff and ear-trumpet and starts anew.

The New Testament suggests the power of the ’93tale that is told.’94 Christ was the most effective story-teller of all the ages. The parables are only tales well told. Matchless stories: that of the traveler cut up by the thieves and the Samaritan paying his board-bill at the tavern; that of the big dinner, to which the invited guests sent in fictitious regrets; that of the shepherd answering the bleat of the lost sheep, and all the rural neighbors that night helping him celebrate the fact that it was safe in the barnyard; that of the bad boy, reduced to the swines’92 trough, greeted home with such banqueting and jewelry that it stuffed the older son with jealousy and disgruntlement; that of the Pharisee full of braggadocio, and the publican smiting his breast with a stroke that brought down the heavens in commiseration; stories about leprosy, about paralysis, about catalepsy, about dropsy, about ophthalmia’97stories that he so well told that they have rolled down to the present, and will roll down through the entire future.

The most of the Old Testament is made up of inspired anecdotes about Adam and Eve, about Jacob, about Esau, about Ahab and Jezebel, about Jonah, about Daniel, about Deborah, about Vashti’97about men and women of whom the story gave an accurate photograph long before human photography was born. Let all Christian workers, prayer-meeting talkers, Sunday-school teachers, and preachers, know the power of that which my text calls the ’93tale that is told.’94

I heard Daniel Baker, the wonderful evangelist of his time, preach what I suppose was a great sermon, but I remember nothing of it except a story that he told, and that, I judge from the seeming effect, may that afternoon have brought hundreds into the kingdom of God. I heard Truman Osborne preach several sermons, but I remember nothing of what he said in public or private except a story that he told, and that was, among other things, the means of my salvation. The life-long work of John B. Gough, the greatest temperance reformer of all time, was the victory of anecdote, and who can ever forget his story of Joel Stratton touching him on the shoulder, or of Deacon Moses Grant at Hopkinton, or of the outcast woman, nicknamed ’93Hell Fire,’94 but redeemed by the thought that she ’93was one of us?’94 Dwight L. Moody, the evangelist of world-wide fame and usefulness, now called from labor to reward, wielded the anecdote for God and heaven until all nations have been moved by it.

If you have had experiences of pardon and comfort and disenthralment, tell of it. Tell it in the most pointed and dramatic way you can manage. Tell it soon, or you may never tell it at all. Oh, the power of ’93the tale that is told!’94 An hour’92s discourse about the fact that blasphemous behavior is sometimes punished in this world would not impress us as much as the simple story that in a town of New York State, at the close of the last century, thirty-six profane men formed themselves into a club, calling themselves ’93Society of the Druids.’94 They met regularly to deride and damage Christianity. One night in their awful meeting they burned a Bible and administered the sacrament to a dog. Two of them died that night. Within three days three were drowned. In five years all the thirty-six came to a bad end. Before justices of the peace it was sworn that two were starved to death, seven were drowned, eight were shot, five committed suicide, seven died on the gallows, one was frozen to death, and three died accidentally. Incidents like that, sworn to, would balk any proposed irreverent and blasphemous behavior.

In what way could the fact that infidelity will not help any one die well be so powerfully presented as by the incident concerning a man falling ill in Paris just after the death of Voltaire, when a professional nurse was called in and she asked: ’93Is the gentleman a Christian?’94 ’93Why do you ask that?’94 said the messenger. The nurse replied: ’93I am the nurse who attended Voltaire in his last illness, and for all the wealth of Europe I would never see another infidel die.’94 What discourse in its moral and spiritual effect could equal a tale like that?’94

You might argue upon the fact that those fallen are our brothers and sisters, but could we impress any one with such a truth so well as by the scene near Victoria Park, London, where men were digging a deep drain, and the shoring gave way and a great pile of earth fell upon the workmen. A man stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at those who were trying to shovel away the earth from those who were buried, but when some one said to the spectator: ’93Bill, your brother is down there,’94 then the spectator threw off his coat and went to work with an agony of earnestness to fetch up his brother. What course of argument could so well as that incident set forth that when we toil for the salvation of a soul it is a brother whom we are trying to save?

A second reading of my text reminds me that life it not only a story told, but that it is a brief story. A long narrative stretched out indefinitely loses its interest. It is generally the story that takes only a minute or half a minute to rehearse that arrests the attention. And that gives additional interest to the story of our life. It is a short story. Subtract from our life all the hours of necessary sleep, all the hours of incapacity through fatigue or illness, all the hours of childhood and youth before we get fairly to work, and you have abbreviated the story of life so much that you can appreciate the Psalmist’92s remark, when he says, ’93Thou hast made my days as a hand’92s breadth,’94 and can appreciate the apostle James’92s expression, when he compares life to ’93a vapor that appeareth for a little season, and then vanishes away.’94

It does not take long to tell all the vicissitudes of life’97the gladness and the griefs, the arrivals and the departures, the successes and the failures, the victories and the defeats, the ups and the downs. The longer we live the shorter the years. We hardly get over the bewildering fatigue of selecting gifts for children and friends, and see that the presents get off in time to arrive on the appropriate day, than we see another advancing group of holidays. Autumnal fruit so sharply chases the summer harvest, and the snow of the white blossoms of springtime come so soon after the snows of winter. It is a remark so often made that it fails to make any impression and the platitude that calls forth no reply: ’93How rapidly time goes.’94

Every century is a big wheel of years, which makes a hundred revolutions and breaks down. Every year is a big wheel of months, and makes twelve revolutions and then ceases. Geologists and theologians go into elaborations of guesses as to how long the world will probably last: how long before the volcanic forces will explode it, or meteoric stroke demolish it, or the cold of a long winter freeze out its population, or the fires of a last conflagration burn it. That is all very well, but so far as the present population of the earth is concerned, the world will last but a little longer. We begin life with a cry and end it with a groan, and the cry and the groan are not far apart. Life, Job says, is like the flight of a weaver’92s shuttle, or, as David intimates in my text, a story quickly told, and laughed at and gone, and displaced by another story, as a ’93tale that is told.’94

I have to say that if life is so short we have not much of it to waste. In all our engagements ten o’92clock ought to be ten o’92clock, and three o’92clock three o’92clock, and eight o’92clock eight o’92clock. I will not waste your time, and you must not waste my time. Just reproof was that which Mrs. Washington, the wife of the first President, gave James Peale, the great painter. His daughter says: ’93My father had an engagement to paint a miniature of Mrs. Washington in Philadelphia, the General being then out of town. He was obliged to go to her house, and the appointment of a sitting was arranged at seven o’92clock in the morning. My father arrived at the house, and taking out his watch he found he was exactly on time. A thought then struck him that possibly it might be early to disturb a lady, and he decided to give ten minutes’92 grace before knocking at the door. He accordingly walked the pavement, and at the end of ten minutes pulled out his watch and rang the bell. He was ushered into the parlor, and Mrs. Washington, accosting him, drew out her watch and said she had given her orders for the day, had heard her daughter take, her lesson on the harpsichord, and had read all the morning papers, and after all this had been waiting for him ten minutes.’94

My friends, as our life is short, punctuality is one of the important virtues, and lack of punctuality one of the worst of crimes. How many who know nothing of punctuality! They arrive at the depot five minutes after the train is gone. They get to the wharf in time to see that the steamer has swung five hundred yards from the dock. They are late at church, and annoy all who have promptly taken their places, the latecomers not being as good as a Christian woman who, when asked how she could always be so early at church, replied: ’93It is part of my religion not to disturb the religion of others.’94 The tardy ones mentioned are apt to speak the word of counsel when it is too late. They are resolved to repent at some time in the future, but when they come up ’93the door is shut.’94 They resolve to save a soul when it is already ruined.

But short as time is, it is long enough if we rightly employ it. The trouble is we waste so much time we cannot catch up. Some of us have been chasing time we lost at twenty years of age or thirty years of age or forty years of age, and if we lived two hundred and fifty years we could never overtake it. Joseph, a poor apprentice, every morning passed a certain store as the church clock struck six, at the moment when the merchant took down his shutters, each of them saying ’93Good morning, sir,’94 and nothing else. What was Joseph’92s surprise to find that the merchant had suddenly died and left him his store and business. That is not the only instance where a man has made a fortune by punctuality. The poet’92s verse reads,

Time flies away fast,

The while we never remember.

How soon our life here

Grows old with the year

That dies with the next December.

A third reading of my text reminds me that life is not only a story told, but a story listened to. There is nothing more vexatious to any one than to tell a story when people are not attending. They may be whispering on some other subject, or they are preoccupied. One cannot tell a story effectually unless there are good listeners. Well, that which in my text is called the ’93tale that is told’94 has plenty of listeners. There is no such thing as solitude, no such thing as being alone. God listens, and the air is full of spiritual intelligences all listening, and the world listens to the story of our life, some hoping it will be successful, others hoping it will be a failure.

We talk about public life and private life, but there is no private life. The story of our life, however insignificant it may seem to be, will win the applause or hiss of a great multitude that no man can number. As a ’93tale that is told’94 among admirers or antagonists, celestials or pandemoniacs, the universe is full of listening ears as well as of gleaming eyes. If we say or do the right thing, that is known. If we say or do the wrong thing, that is known. I suppose the population of the intelligences in the air is more numerous than the population of intelligences on the earth. Oh, that the story of our life might be fit for such an audience in such an auditorium! God grant that wisdom and fidelity and earnestness and truth may characterize the ’93tale that is told.’94

Ay! all the world will yet listen to, and be redeemed by, a ’93tale that is told.’94 We are all telling it, each in his own way’97some by voice, some by pen, some by artist’92s pencil, some by harp, and some by song; mother telling it to child, teacher telling it to Sabbath class, reformer telling it to outcast, preacher telling it to assemblage. The story of the Loveliest of heaven coming down to this scarred and blasted island of a world. He was ordered back from its shores, and struck through with lances of human hate as soon as he landed. Shepherd’92s dog baying on the hills that Christmas night was better treated than this Rescuer of a race; yet keeping right on, brambles on brow, feet on spikes, flagellated with whips that had lumps of lead fastened to them, through midnights without lanterns, through storms without a shelter, through years that got blacker until they ended in a noonday with the sun blotted out. Mightiest tale ever told! and keep on telling it until the last sorrow is assuaged, and the last animosity is quelched, and the last desert is white with the lily and golden with the cowslip and blue with the gentian and crimson with the rose.

While reading my text the fourth time I bethink myself that the story of life will end when the group breaks up. The ’93tale that is told’94 stops when the listeners depart. Sometimes we have been in groups interestedly listening to some story told, when other engagements or the hour of the night demanded the going of the guests. That stopped the story. By this exit of another year I am reminded that these earthly groups will break up. No family group or social group or religious group or political group stays long together. Suppose some one should take from the national archives the roll of yonder United States Senate chamber, or the roll of yonder House of Representatives, as it was made up twenty years ago, and then call the roll. The silence would be mightier than the voices that would hear and respond.

The family group breaks up. Did you ever know a household that for twenty-five years remained intact? Not one. Was there ever a church record the same after the passage of twenty-five years or fifteen years or ten years? The fact is that the story of our life will soon end, because the group of listeners will be gone. So you see if we are going to give the right trend and emphasis, we must give it right away. If there are old people in the group of our influence, all we can do for them will be in five or ten years. If there are children around us, in ten or fifteen years they will no longer be children, and they will be fashioning the story of their own life. ’93What thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’94 Passing all, passing everything, as a ’93tale that is told.’94

My text, in referring to the years, reminds me that in twelve hours this year will forever have gone away. Ninety-nine out of the hundred years of this century will have disappeared. We have only one year of the century left. There ought to be something especially suggestive in the last year of a century. It ought to be a year of unparalleled industries, of unheard-of consecration. Not a person in any of our audiences this day can remember the first year of this century. Not a person in any of our audiences today, will ever again see the last of a century.

Through medical science the world’92s longevity may be greatly improved in the future, as it has been in the past, but it would not be well for people to live too long. Some of them would, through their skill at acquisitiveness, gather too much, and some multimillionaires would become billionaires and trillionaires, and some one would after a while pocket a hemi-sphere. No. Death is useful in its financial limitations, and then all have enough sorrows and annoyances and sufferings by the time they become nonagenarians or centenarians to make it desirable to quit. Besides that, it would not be fair so long to keep so many good old people out of heaven. So it is well arranged that those who stand by the death-bed of the nineteenth century will not be called to stand by the death-bed of the twentieth century.

Oh, crowd this last year with prayers, with hosannas, with kind words, with helpfulness. Make the peroration of the century the climax of Christlike deeds. Close up the ranks of God, and during this remaining twelve months charge mightily against the host of Abaddon. Have no reserve corps. Let swiftest Gospel cavalry gallop, and heaviest moral artillery roll, and mightiest evangelistic batteries thunder on the scene. Let ministers of the Gospel quit all controversy with each other, and in solid phalanx march out for the world’92s disenthralment. Let printing presses, secular and religious, make combined movement to instruct and emancipate the world. On all the hills let there be Elijahs praying for ’93a great rain,’94 and on every contested field Joshuas to see that final victory is gained before the sun goes down, and every mountain become a transfiguration, and every Galilee a walking place of him who can hush a tempest. Let us be jealous of every month, of every week, of every day, that passes without something significant and glorious wrought for God and this sin-cursed world. Let our churches be thronged with devout assemblages. Let the chorals be more like grand marches than requiems. Let this coming year see the last wound of Transvaal and Philippine conflict, and the earth quake with the grounding arms of the last regiment ever to be marshaled, and the furnaces of the foundries blaze with the fires that shall turn the last swords into plowshares.

And may all those whose lives shall go out in this last year of a century, as many will, meet in the heavenly world those who in the morning and noonday of this hundred years toiled and suffered for the world’92s salvation, to tell them how much has been accomplished for the glory of him whose march through the last nineteen centuries and through all the coming centuries the Scriptures describe as going forth ’93conquering and to conquer.’94 Oh! the contrast between that uplifted spectacle of eternal triumph in the presence of God and the Lamb, and these earthly scenes, where ’93we spend our years as a tale that is told.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage