212. The Dangers of Pessimism

The Dangers of Pessimism

Psa_116:11 : ’93I said in my haste, all men are liars.’94

Swindled, betrayed, persecuted, David, in a paroxysm of petulance and rage, thus insulted the human race. David himself falsified when he said, ’93All men are liars.’94 He apologizes and says he was unusually provoked, and that he was hasty when he hurled such universal denunciation: ’93I said in my haste,’94 and so on. It was in his case only a momentary triumph of pessimism. There is ever and anon, a disposition abroad to distrust everybody, and because some bank employees defraud, to distrust all bank employees; and because some police officers have taken bribes, to believe that all policemen take bribes; and because many divorce cases are in court, to believe that most, if not all, marriage relations are unhappy. There are men who seem rapidly coming to adopt this creed: All men are liars, scoundrels, thieves, libertines. When a new case of perfidy comes to the surface, these people clap their hands in glee. It gives piquancy to their breakfast if the morning newspaper makes a new exposure or reports a new arrest. They grow fat on vermin. They join the devils in hell in jubilation over recreancy and pollution. If some one arrested is proved innocent, it is to them a disappointment. They would rather believe evil than good. They are vultures, preferring a diet of carrion. They would like to be on a committee to find something wrong. They wish that as eyeglasses have been invented to improve the sight, and ear-trumpets have been invented to help the hearing, a corresponding instrument might be invented for the nose, to bring nearer a malodor.

Pessimism says of the Church, ’93The majority of the members are hypocrites,’94 although it is no temporal advantage to be a member of the Church, and therefore there is no temptation to hypocrisy. Pessimism says that the influence of newspapers is wholly bad, and that they are corrupting the world; when the fact is that they are the mightiest agency for the arrest of crime, and the spread of intelligence, and the printing-press, secular and religious, is setting nations free. The whole tendency of such views is toward cynicism and the Gospel of Smash-up. We excuse David of the text for a paroxysm of disgust, because he apologizes for it to all the centuries; but it is a deplorable fact that many have taken the attitude of perpetual distrust and anathematization, There are, we must admit, deplorable facts, and we would not hide or minify them. We were not much encouraged when some municipal reformers in New York began their campaign with a proposal to allow the liquor dealers to break the law by keeping their saloons open on Sunday from two in the afternoon to eleven at night. Never since America was discovered has there been a worse insult to sobriety and decency and religion than that proposition. That proposition is equal to saying: ’93Let law and order and religion have a chance on Sunday forenoons, but on Sunday afternoons open all the gates to gin and alcohol and Schiedam schnapps and sour mash and Jersey lightning and the variegated swill of breweries and drunkenness and crime. Consecrate the first half of the Sunday to God and the last half to the devil. Let the children on their way to Sunday School in New York at three o’92clock in the afternoon, meet the alcoholism that does more than all other causes combined to rob children of their fathers and mothers, and strew the land with helpless orphanage.’94 Surely, strong drink can kill enough people and destroy enough families, and sufficiently crowd the almshouses and penitentiaries in six days of the week, without giving it an extra half-day for pauperism and assassination.

Although we could not be very jubilant over a municipal reform that opens the exercises by a doxology to rum, we have full faith in God and in the Gospel, which will yet sink all iniquity as the Atlantic Ocean melts a flake of snow. What we want, and what I believe we will have, is a great religious awakening that will moralize and Christianize our great populations, and make them superior to temptations, whether unlawful or legalized. So I see no cause for disheartenment. Pessimism is a sin, and those who yield to it cripple themselves for the war, on one side of which are all the forces of darkness, led on by Apollyon, and on the other side of which are all the forces of light, led on by the Omnipotent. I take the risk of making the statement that the vast majority of people are doing the best they can. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the officials of the municipal and the United States governments are honest. Out of a thousand bank presidents and cashiers, nine hundred and ninety-nine are worthy the position they occupy. Out of a thousand merchants, mechanics and professional men, nine hundred and ninety-nine are doing their duty as they understand it. Out of one thousand engineers and conductors and switchmen, nine hundred and ninety-nine are true to their responsible positions. It is seldom that people arrive at positions of responsibility until they have been tested over and over again. If the theory of the pessimist was accurate, society would long ago have gone to pieces, and civilization would have been submerged with barbarism, and the wheel of the centuries would have turned back to the dark ages.

A wrong impression is made by the fact that when two men falsify their bank accounts, those two wrongdoers are blazoned before the world, while nothing is said in praise of the hundreds of bank clerks who have stood at their desks year in and year out until their health is well-nigh gone, taking not a pin’92s worth of that which belongs to others for themselves, though with skilful stroke of pen they might have enriched themselves, and built their country seats on the banks of the Hudson or the Rhine. It is a mean thing in human nature that men and women are not praised for doing well, but only excoriated when they do wrong. By divine arrangement the most of the families of the earth are at peace, and the most of those united in marriage have for each other affinity and affection. They may have occasional differences, and here and there a season of pout but the vast majority of those in the conjugal relation, chose the most appropriate companionship and are happy in that relation. You hear nothing of the quietude and happiness of such homes, though nothing but death will them part. But one sound of marital discord makes the ears of a continent, and perhaps of a hemisphere, alert. The one letter that ought never to have been written, printed in a newspaper, makes more talk than the millions of letters that crowd the post-offices and weigh down the mail-carriers with expressions of honest love. Tolstoi, the great Russian author, is wrong when he prints a book for the depreciation of marriage. If your observation has put you in an attitude of antagonism to the marriage state, one of two things is true in regard to you’97you have either been unfortunate in your acquaintanceship, or you yourself are morally rotten.

The world’97not as rapidly as we would like, but still with long strides’97is on the way to the scenes of beatitude and felicity which the Bible depicts. The man who cannot see this is wrong, either in his heart or liver, or spleen. Look at the great Bible picture gallery, where Isaiah has set up the pictures of arborescence, girdling the world with cedar and fir and pine and boxwood, and the lion led by a child; and St. John’92s pictures of waters and trees and white horse cavalry and tears wiped away and trumpets blown, and harps struck and nations redeemed. While there are ten thousand things I do not like, I have not seen in twenty-five years, any reason to lose hope in the triumph of the cause of God. The kingdom is coming. The earth is preparing to put on bridal array. We need to be getting our anthems and grand marches ready. In our hymnology we shall have more use for Antioch than for Windham; for Ariel than for Naomi. Let ’93Hark! from the tombs a doleful cry,’94 be submerged with ’93Joy to the world, the Lord is come!’94 Really, if I thought the human race were as determined to be bad, and getting worse, as the pessimists represent, I would think it was hardly worth saving. If after hundreds of years of Gospelization no improvement has been made, let us give it up and go at something else beside praying and preaching. My opinion is that if we had enough faith in quick results, and could go forth rightly equipped with the Gospel call, the battle of God and righteousness would come to grander victory with this nineteenth century; and the twentieth century would begin the millennium; and Christ would reign, either in person on some throne set up either in Jerusalem, as the prophets say, or between the Alleghanies and the Rockies, or in the institutions of mercy and grandeur set up by his ransomed people.

Discouraged work will meet with defeat. Expectant and buoyant work will gain the triumph. Start out with the idea that all men are liars and scoundrels, and that everybody is as bad as he can be, and that society and the Church and the world are on the way to demolition, and the only use you will ever be to the world will be to increase the value of lots in a cemetery. We need a more cheerful front in all our religious work. People have enough trouble already, and do not want to ship another cargo of trouble in the shape of religiosity. If religion has been to you a peace, a defense, an inspiration, and a joy, say so. Say it by word of mouth; by pen in your right hand; by face illumined with a divine satisfaction. If this world is ever to be taken for God, it will not be by groans, but by hallelujahs. If we could present the Christian religion as it really is, in its true attractiveness, all the people would accept it, and accept it right away. The cities, the nations would cry out: ’93Give us that! Give it to us in all its holy magnetism and gracious power! Put that salve on our wounds! Throw back the shutters for that morning light! Knock off these chains with that silver hammer! Give us Christ’97his pardon, his peace, his comfort, his heaven! Give us Christ in song; Christ in sermon; Christ in book; Christ in living example!’94

As a system of didactics, religion has never gained one inch of progress. As a technicality, it befogs more than it irradiates. As a dogmatism, it is an awful failure. But as a fact, as a re-enforcement, as a transfiguration, it is the mightiest thing that ever descended from the heavens, or touched the earth. Exemplify it in the life of a good man or a good woman, and no one can help but like it. A city missionary visited a house in London and found a sick and dying boy. There was an orange lying on his bed, and the missionary said: ’93Where did you get that orange?’94 He said: ’93A man brought it to me. He comes here often and reads the Bible to me and prays with me and brings me nice things to eat.’94 ’93What is his name?’94 said the city missionary. ’93I forget his name,’94 said the sick boy, ’93but he makes great speeches over in that great building,’94 pointing to the Parliament House of London. The missionary asked: ’93Was his name Mr. Gladstone?’94 ’93Oh, yes,’94 said the boy, ’93that is his name; Mr. Gladstone.’94 Do you tell me a man can see religion like that and not like it?

There is an old-fashioned mother in a farmhouse. Perhaps she is somewhere in the seventies; perhaps seventy-five or seventy-six. It is the early evening hour. Through spectacles No. 8 she is reading a newspaper until towards bed-time, when she takes up a well-worn book, called the Bible. I know from the illumination in her face she is reading one of the thanksgiving Psalms, or in Revelation the story of the twelve pearly gates. After a while she closes the book and folds her hands and thinks over the past, and seems whispering the names of her children, some of them on earth and some of them in heaven. Now a smile is on her face, and now a tear, and sometimes the smile catches the tear. The scenes of a long life come back to her. One minute she sees all the children smiling around her, with their toys, and sports and strange questionings. Then she remembers several of them down sick with infantile disorders. Then she sees a short grave, but over it cut in marble: ’93Suffer them to come to me.’94 Then there is the wedding hour, and the neighbors in, and the promise of ’93I will,’94 and the departure from the old homestead. Then a scene of hard times and scant bread and struggle. Then she thinks of a few years with gush of sunshine and flittings of dark shadows and vicissitudes. Then she kneels down slowly, for many years have stiffened the joints, and the illnesses of a lifetime have made her less supple. Her prayer is a mixture of thanks for sustaining grace during all those years; and thanks for children good, and Christian, and kind; and a prayer for the wandering boy, whom she hopes to see come home before her departure. And then her trembling lips speak of the land of reunion where she expects to meet her loved ones already translated; and after telling the Lord in very simple language how much she loves him, and trusts him, and hopes to see him soon, I hear her pronounce the quiet ’93Amen,’94 and she rises up’97a little more difficult effort than kneeling down. And then she puts her head on the pillow for the night, and the angels of safety and peace stand sentinel about that couch in the farmhouse; and her face ever and anon shows signs of dreams about the heaven she read of before retiring.

In the morning the day’92s work has begun downstairs, and seated at the table the remark is made: ’93Mother must have overslept herself.’94 And the grandchildren also notice that grandmother is absent from her usual place at the table. One of the grandchildren goes to the foot of the stairs and cries: ’93Grandmother!’94 But there is no answer. Fearing something is the matter, they go up to see, and all seems right. The spectacles and Bible on the stand, and the covers of the bed are smooth, and the face is calm, her white hair on the white pillow-case like snow already fallen. But her soul is gone up to look upon the things that the night before she had been reading of in the Scriptures. What a transporting look on her dear old wrinkled face! She has seen the ’93King in his beauty.’94 She has been welcomed by the ’93Lamb who was slain.’94 And her two oldest sons having hurried upstairs, look and whisper, Henry to George: ’93That is religion!’94 and George to Henry: ’93Yes, that is religion!’94

There is a New York merchant who has been in business I should say forty or fifty years. During an old-fashioned revival of religion in boyhood he gave his heart to God. He did not make the ghastly and infinite and everlasting mistake of sowing ’93wild oats,’94 with the expectation of reaping good wheat later on. He realized the fact that the most of those who sow ’93wild oats’94 never reap any other crop. He started right and has kept right. He went down in 1857, when the banks failed; but he failed honestly, and never lost his faith in God. Ups and downs’97he sometimes laughs over them’97but whether losing or gaining, he was growing better all the time. He has been in many business ventures, but he never ventured the experiment of gaining the world and losing his soul. His name was a power both in the Church and in the business world. He has drawn more checks for contributions to asylums and churches and schools than is known to any one, except God. He has kept many a business man from failing by lending his name on the back of a note till the crisis was past. All heaven knows about him, for the poor woman whose rent he paid in her last days, and the man with consumption in the hospital to whom he sent flowers and the cordials just before ascension, and the people he encouraged in many ways, after they entered heaven kept talking about it; for the immortals are neither deaf nor dumb. Well it is about time for the old merchant himself to quit earthly residence. As it is toward evening, he shuts the safe, puts the roll of newspapers in his pocket, thinking that the family may like to read them after he gets home. He holds up a five-dollar bill and gives it to the boy to carry to one of the carmen who got his leg broken, and may be in need of a little money; puts a stamp on a letter to his grandson at college, a letter with good advice and an enclosure to make the holidays happy; then looks around the store or office and says to the clerks: ’93Good evening,’94 and starts for home, stopping on the way at a door to ask how his old friend, a deacon in the same church, is getting on since his last bad attack of vertigo.

He enters his own home, and that is his last evening on earth. He does not say much. No last words are necessary. His whole life has been a testimony for God and righteousness. More people would like to attend his obsequies than any house or church would hold. The officiating clergyman begins his remarks by quoting from the Psalmist: ’93Help, Lord, for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fail from among the children of men.’94 Every hour in heaven for all the million years of eternity that old merchant will see the results of his earthly beneficence and fidelity; while on the street where he did business and in the orphan asylum in which he was a director and in the church of which he was an officer, whenever his geniality and beneficence and goodness are referred to, bank director will say to bank director and merchant to merchant and neighbor to neighbor, and Christian to Christian: ’93That is religion. Yes, that is religion.’94

There is a man seated or standing very near you. Do not look at him, for it might be unnecessary embarrassment. Only a few minutes ago he came down off the steps of as happy a home as there is in this or any other city. Fifteen years ago, by reason of his dissipated habits his home was a horror to wife and children. What that woman went through with in order to preserve respectability and hide her husband’92s disgrace is a tragedy which it would require a Shakespeare or Victor Hugo to write out in five tremendous acts. Shall I tell it? He struck her! Yes, the one whom at the altar he had taken with vows so solemn they made the orange blossoms tremble! He struck her! He made the beautiful holidays ’93a reign of terror.’94 Instead of his supporting her, she supported him. The children had often heard him speak the name of God, but never in prayer, only in profanity. It was the saddest thing on earth that I can think of’97a destroyed home! Walking along the street one day an impersonation of all wretchedness, he saw a sign at the door of a Young Men’92s Christian Association: ’93Meeting for men only.’94 He went in, hardly knowing why he did so, and sat down by the door, and a young man was in broken voice and poor grammar telling how the Lord had saved him from a dissipated life, and the man back by the door said to himself: ’93Why cannot I have the Lord do the same thing for me?’94 and he put his hands all a-tremble over his bloated face, and said: ’93O God, I want that! I must have that!’94 and God said: ’93You shall have it, and you have it now!’94 And the man came out and went home a changed man, and though the children at first shrunk back and looked to the mother and began to cry with fright, they soon saw that the father was a changed man. That home has turned from ’93Paradise Lost’94 to ’93Paradise Regained.’94 The wife sings all day long at her work, for she is so happy, and the children rush out into the hall at the first rattle of the father’92s key in the door-latch to welcome him with caresses and questions of: ’93What have you brought me?’94 They have family prayers. They are all together on the road to heaven, and when the journey of life is over they will live forever in each other’92s companionship. Two of their darling children are there already, waiting for father and mother to come up. What changed that man? What reconstructed that home? What took that wife who was a slave of fear and drudgery, and made her a queen on a throne of affection? I hear a whispering all through this assemblage. I know what you are saying: ’93That’92s religion! Yes, that’92s religion!’94 My Lord and my God, give us more of it!

Why, my hearers from all parts of the earth, do you not get this bright, and beautiful and radiant and blissful and triumphant thing for yourselves, then go home telling all your neighbors on the Pacific or in Nova Scotia or in Louisiana or Maine or Brazil or England or Italy, or any part of the round world, that they may have it, too; have it for the asking; have it now? Mind you, I do not start from the pessimistic standpoint that David did, when he got mad and said in his haste: ’93All men are liars!’94 or from the creed of others that every man is as bad as he can be. I rather think from your looks that you are doing about as well as you can in the circumstances in which you are placed, but I want to invite you up into heights of safety, and satisfaction, and holiness, as much higher than those which the world affords as Everest, the highest mountain in all the earth, is higher than your front doorstep.

Here he comes now. Who is it? I might be alarmed and afraid if I had not seen him before and heard his voice. I thought he would come before I got through with this sermon. Stand back and make way for him. He comes with scars all around his forehead; scars in the centre of both hands stretched out to greet you; scars on the instep of both the feet with which he advances; scars on the breast under which throbs the great heart of sympathy which feels for you. I announce him. I introduce him to you’97Jesus of Bethlehem and Olivet and Golgotha. Why comest thou hither this winter day, thou of the springtime and summery heavens? He answers: ’93To give all this audience pardon for guilt; condolence for grief; whole regiments of help for day of battle; and eternal life for the dead!’94 What response shall I give him? In your behalf and in my own behalf I hail him with the ascription: ’93Unto him who hath loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage