325. The Three Greatest Things to Do

The Three Greatest Things to Do

Dan_11:32 : ’93The people that do know their God, shall be strong and do exploits.’94

Antiochus Epiphanes, the old sinner, came down three times with his army to desolate the Jews, advancing one time with a hundred and two trained elephants swinging their tusks this way and that, and sixty-two thousand infantry, and six thousand cavalry troops, and they were driven back. Then, the second time, he advanced with seventy thousand armed men, and had been again defeated. But the third time he laid successful siege until the navy of Rome came in with the flash of their long banks of oars and demanded that the siege be lifted. And Antiochus Epiphanes said he wanted time to consult with his friends about it, and Popilius, one of the Roman ambassadors, took a staff and made a circle on the ground around Antiochus Epiphanes, and compelled him to decide before he came out of that circle; whereupon he lifted the siege. Some of the Jews had submitted to the invader, but some of them resisted valorously, as did Eleazer when he had swine’92s flesh forced into his mouth, spit it out, although he knew he must die for it, and did die for it; and others, as my text says, were enabled to do exploits.

An exploit I would define to be a heroic act, a brave feat, a great achievement. ’93Well,’94 you say, ’93I admire such things, but there is no chance for me; mine is a sort of a humdrum life. If I had an Antiochus Epiphanes to fight, I also could do exploits. You are right, so far as great wars are concerned. There will probably be no opportunity to distinguish yourself in battle. The most of the brigadier-generals of this country would never have been heard of had it not been for the civil war. General Grant would have remained in the useful but inconspicuous work of tanning hides at Galena, and Stonewall Jackson would have continued the quiet college professor in Virginia. And whatever military talents you have will probably lie dormant forever.

Neither will you probably become a great inventor. Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine out of every two thousand inventions found in the Patent Office at Washington never yielded their authors enough money to pay for the expenses of securing the patent. So you will probably never be a Morse or an Edison or a Humphrey Davy or an Eli Whitney. There is not much probability that you will be the one out of the hundred that achieves extraordinary success in commercial or legal or medical or literary spheres. What then? Can you have no opportunity to do exploits? I am going to show that there are three opportunities open that are grand, thrilling, far-reaching, stupendous and overwhelming. They are before you now. In one, if not all three of them, you may do exploits. The three greatest things on earth to do are to save a man, or save a woman, or save a child.

During the course of his life, almost every man gets into an exigency, is caught between two fires, is ground between two millstones, sits on the edge of some precipice, or in some other way comes near demolition. It may be a financial or moral or domestic or social or political exigency. You sometimes see it in court-rooms. A young man has got into bad company and he has offended the law and he is arraigned. All blushing and confused, he is in the presence of judge and jury and lawyers. He can be sent right on in the wrong direction. He is feeling disgraced, and he is almost desperate. Let the district attorney overhaul him as though he were an old offender; let the ablest attorneys at the bar refuse to say a word for him, because he cannot afford a considerable fee; let the judge give no opportunity for presenting the mitigating circumstances, and let him hurry up the case, and hustle him up to Auburn or Sing Sing. If he live seventy years, for seventy years he will be a criminal, and each decade of his life will be blacker than its predecessor. In the interregnums of prison life he can get no work, and he is glad to break a window-glass, or blow up a safe, or play the highwayman, so as to get back again within the walls where he can get something to eat, and hide himself from the gaze of the world. Why does not his father come and help him? His father is dead? Why does not his mother come and help him? She is dead. Where are all the ameliorating and salutary influences of society? They do not touch him. Why did not some one long ago, knowing the case, understand that there was an opportunity for the exploit which would be famous in heaven a quadrillion of years after the earth has become scattered ashes in the last whirlwind? Why did not the district attorney take that young man into his private office and say: ’93My son, I see that you are the victim of circumstances. This is your first crime. You are sorry. I will bring the person you wronged into your presence, and you will apologize and make all the reparation you can, and I will give you another chance.’94 Or that young man is presented in the court-room, and he has no friends present, and the judge says: ’93Who is your counsel?’94 And he answers: ’93I have none.’94 And the judge says: ’93Who will take this young man’92s case?’94 And there is a dead halt, and no one offers, and after a while the judge turns to some attorney, who never had a good case in all his life, and never will, and whose advocacy would be enough to secure the condemnation of innocence itself. And the professional incompetent crawls up beside the prisoner’97helplessness to rescue despair’97when there ought to be a struggle among all the best men of the profession as to who should have the honor of trying to help that unfortunate. How much would such an attorney have received as his fee for such an advocacy? Nothing in dollars, but much in every way in a happy consciousness that would make his own life brighter, and his own dying pillow softer, and his own heaven happier’97the consciousness that he had saved a man!

So there are commercial exigencies. A very late spring obliterates the demand for spring overcoats and spring hats and spring apparel of all sorts. Hundreds of thousands of people say: ’93It seems we are going to have no spring, and we shall go straight out of winter into warm weather, and we can get along without the usual spring attire.’94 Or there is no autumn weather, the heat plunging into the cold, and the usual clothing, which is a compromise between summer and winter, is not required. It makes a difference in the sale of millions and millions of dollars of goods, and some over-sanguine young merchant is caught with a vast amount of unsalable goods that never will be salable again, except at prices ruinously reduced. That young merchant with a somewhat limited capital is in a predicament. What shall the old merchants do as they see that young man in this awful crisis? Rub their hands and laugh and say: ’93Good for him. He might have known better. When he has been in business as long as we have, he will not load his shelves in that way. Ha! Ha! He will burst up before long. He had no business to open his store so near to ours anyhow.’94 Sheriff’92s sale! Red flag in the window: ’93How much is bid for these out-of-the-fashion spring overcoats and spring hats, or fall clothing out of date? What do I hear in the way of a bid?’94 ’93Four dollars.’94 ’93Absurd; I cannot take that bid of four dollars apiece. Why, these coats when first put upon the market were offered at fifteen dollars each, and now I am offered only four dollars. Is that all? Five dollars, do I hear? Going at that! Gone at five dollars,’94 and he takes the whole lot.

The young merchant goes home that night and says to his wife: ’93Well, Mary, we will have to move out of this house and sell our piano. That old merchant that has had an evil eye on me ever since I started has bought out all that clothing, and he will have it rejuvenated, and next year put it on the market as new, while we will do well if we keep out of the poor-house.’94 The young man, broken-spirited, goes to hard drinking. The young wife with her baby goes to her father’92s house, and not only is his store wiped out, but his home, his morals, and his prospects for two worlds’97this and the next. And devils make a banquet of fire and fill their cups of gall, and drink deep to the health of the old merchant, who swallowed up the young merchant, who got stuck on spring goods and went down. That is one way, and some of you have tried it.

But there is another way. That young merchant who found that he had miscalculated in laying in too many goods of one kind, and been flung off the unusual season, is standing behind the counter, feeling very blue, and biting his finger-nails, or looking over his account-books, which read darker and worse every time he looks at them, and he thinks how his young wife will have to be put in a plainer house than she ever expected to live in, or go to a third-rate boarding-house where they have tough liver and sour bread five mornings out of the seven. An old merchant comes in and says: ’93Well, Joe, this has been a hard season for young merchants, and this prolonged cool weather has put many in the doldrums, and I have been thinking of you a good deal of late, for just after I started in business I once got into the same scrape. Now, if there is anything I can do to help you out I will gladly do it. Better just put those goods out of sight for the present, and next season we will plan something about them. I will help you to some goods that you can sell for me on commission, and I will go down to one of the wholesale houses and tell them that I know you, and will back you up, and if you want a few dollars to bridge over the present, I can let you have them. Be as economical as you can, keep a stiff upper lip, and remember that you have two friends, God and myself. Good morning!’94 The old merchant goes away and the young man goes behind his desk, and the tears roll down his cheeks. It is the first time he has cried. Disaster made him mad at everything, mad at man and mad at God; but this kindness melts him, and the tears seem to relieve his brain, and his spirits rise from ten below zero to eighty in the shade, and he comes out of the crisis. About three years after, this young merchant goes into the old merchant’92s store and says: ’93Well, my old friend, I was this morning thinking over what you did for me three years ago. You helped me out of an awful crisis in my commercial history. I learned wisdom, and prosperity has come, and the pallor has gone out of my wife’92s cheeks, and the roses that were there when I courted her in her father’92s house have bloomed again, and my business is splendid, and I thought I ought to let you know that you saved a man!’94 In a short time after, the old merchant, who had been a good while shaky in his limbs and had poor spells, is called to leave the world, and one morning after he had read the twenty-third Psalm about ’93The Lord is my Shepherd,’94 he closes his eyes on this world, and an angel who had been for many years appointed to watch the old man’92s dwelling, cries upward the news that the patriarch’92s spirit is about ascending. And the twelve angels who keep the twelve gates of heaven, unite in crying down to this approaching spirit of the old man: ’93Come in at any of the twelve gates you choose. Come in and welcome, for it has been told all over this celestial neighborhood that you saved a man.’94

There sometimes come exigencies in the life of a woman. One morning several years ago I saw in the newspaper that there was a young woman in New York, whose pocketbook containing thirty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents had been stolen, and she had been left without a farthing at the beginning of winter, in a strange city, and no work. I did not allow the nine o’92clock mail to leave the lamp-post on our corner, without carrying the thirty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents; and the case was proved genuine. Now I have read all Shakespeare’92s tragedies, and all Victor Hugo’92s tragedies, and all Alexander Smith’92s tragedies, but I never read a tragedy more thrilling than that case, and similar cases by the hundreds and thousands in all our large cities; young women without money and without home and without work in the great maelstrom of metropolitan life. When such a case comes under your observation, how do you treat it? ’93Get out of my way, we have no room in our establishment for any more hands. I don’92t believe in women anyway; they are a lazy, idle, worthless set. John, please show this person out of the door.’94

Or do you compliment her personal appearance, and say things to her which if any man said to your sister or daughter you would be tempted to kill him on the spot? That is one way, and it is tried every day in these large cities, and many of those who advertise for female hands in factories, and for governesses in families, have proved themselves unfit to be in any place outside of hell. But there is another way, and I saw it in the Methodist Book Concern in New York, where a young woman applied for work and the gentleman in tone and manner said in substance: ’93My daughter, we employ women here, but I do not know of any vacant place in our department. But I have a friend in business on Canal street who may have a place for you. Here is my card and my friend’92s address, show it to him, and he will treat you well. Good morning.’94 The embarrassed and humiliated woman seemed to give way to Christian confidence. She started out with a hopeful look that I think must have won for her a place in which to earn her bread. I rather think that considerate and Christian gentleman saved a woman. New York and Brooklyn ground up in one year about thirty thousand young women, and would like to grind up about as many every year. Out of all that long procession of women who march on with no hope for this world or the next, battered and bruised and scoffed at, and flung off the precipice, not one but might have been saved for home and God and heaven. But good men and good women are not in that kind of business. Alas for that poor thing! nothing but the thread of a sewing girl’92s needle held her, and the thread broke.

I have heard men tell in public discourse what a man is; but what is a woman? Until some one shall give a better definition, I will tell you what a woman is. Direct from God, a sacred and delicate gift, with affections so great that no measuring line short of that of the infinite God can tell their bound. Fashioned to refine and soothe and elevate and irradiate home and society and the world. Of such value that no one can appreciate it, unless his mother lived long enough to let him understand it, or who, in some great crisis of life, when all else failed him, had a wife to reinforce him with a faith in God that nothing could disturb. Speak out, ye cradles, and tell of the feet that rocked you and the anxious faces that hovered over you! Speak out, ye nurseries of all Christendom, and ye homes, whether desolate or still in full bloom with the faces of wife, mother, and daughter, and help me to define what woman is. If a man during all his life accomplishes nothing else except to win the love and help and companionship of a good woman, he is the garlanded victor, and ought to have the hand of all people between here and the grave stretched out to him in congratulation.

But as geographers tell us that the depths of the sea correspond with the heights of the mountains, I have to tell you that good womanhood is not higher up than bad womanhood is deep down. The grander the palace, the more awful the conflagration that destroys it. The grander the steamer Oregon, the more terrible her going down just off the coast. Now I should not wonder if you trembled a little with a sense of responsibility when I say that there is hardly a person in this house but may have an opportunity to save a woman. It may in your case be done by good advice, or by financial help, or by trying to bring to bear some one of a thousand Christian influences. You would not have to go far. If, for instance, you know among your acquaintances a young woman who is apt to appear on the streets about the hour when gentlemen return from business, and you find her responding to the smile of entire strangers, hogs that lift their hat, will you not go to her and plainly tell her that nearly all the destroyed womanhood of the world began the downward path with that very behavior. Or if, for instance, you find a woman in financial distress and breaking down in health and spirits trying to support her children, now that her husband is dead or an invalid, doing that very important and honorable work, but which is little appreciated, keeping a boarding-house, where all the guests, according as they pay small board, or propose, without paying any board at all, to decamp, are critical of everything and hard to please, busy yourselves in trying to get her more patrons, and tell her of divine sympathy. Yea, if you see a woman favored of fortune and with all kindly surroundings, finding in the hollow flatteries of the world her chief regalement, living for herself and for time as if there were no eternity, strive to bring her into the kingdom of God, as did the other day a Sabbath-school teacher, who was the means of the conversion of the daughter of a man of immense wealth, and the daughter resolved to join the church, and she went home and said, ’93Father, I am going to join the church and I want you to come.’94 ’93Oh, no,’94 he said, ’93I never go to church.’94 ’93Well,’94 said the daughter, ’93if I were going to be married, would you not go to see me married?’94 And he said, ’93Oh, yes.’94 ’93Well,’94 said she, ’93this is of more importance than that.’94 So he went, and has gone ever since, and loves to go. I do not know but that faithful Sabbath-school teacher not only saved a woman, but saved a man. There may be in this audience, gathered from all parts of the world, the most cosmopolitan assembly in all the earth, there may be a man whose behavior toward womanhood has been perfidious. Repent! Stand up, thou masterpiece of sin and death, that I may charge you! As far as possible, make reparation. Do not boast that you have her in your power and that she cannot help herself. When that fine collar and cravat and that elegant suit of clothes come off and your uncovered soul stands in judgment before God, you will be better off if you save that woman.

There is another exploit you can do, and that is to save a child. A child does not seem to amount to much. It is nearly a year old before it can walk at all. For the first year and a half it cannot speak a word. For the first ten years it would starve if it had to earn its own food. For the first fifteen years its opinion on any subject is absolutely valueless. And then there are so many of them. My! what lots of children! And some people have contempt for children. They are good for nothing but to wear out the carpets and break things and keep you awake nights crying. Well, your estimate of a child is quite different from that mother’92s estimate who lost her child this summer. They took it to the salt air of the seashore and to the tonic air of the mountains, but no help came, and the brief paragraph of its life is ended. Suppose that life could be restored by purchase, how much would that bereaved mother give? She would take all the jewels from her fingers and neck and from the bureau and put them down. And if told that that was not enough, she would take her house and make over the deed for it, and if that were not enough, she would call in all her investments, and put down all her mortgages and bonds, and if told that were not enough, she would say, ’93I have made over all my property, and if I can have that child back I will now pledge that I will toil with my own hands and carry with my own shoulders in any kind of hard work, and live in a cellar and die in a garret. Only give me back that lost darling!’94 I am glad that there are those who know something of the value of a child. Its possibilities are tremendous. What will those hands yet do? Where will those feet yet walk? Toward what destiny will that never-dying soul betake itself? Shall those lips be the throne of blasphemy or benediction? Come, all ye survivors of the earth, bring link and chain, and measure if you can this possible possession. Come, all ye astronomers of the earth with your telescopes, and tell us if you can see the range of its eternal flight. Come, chronologists, and calculate the decades on decades, the centuries on centuries, the cycles on cycles, the eternities on eternities, of its lifetime. Oh, to save a child! Am I not right in putting that among the great exploits? Yea, it eclipses the other two, for if you save the child you save the man, or you save the woman. Get the first twenty years of that boy or girl all right, and I guess you have got the manhood or womanhood all right and their entire earthly and eternal career all right.

But what are you going to do with those children, who are worse off than if their father or mother had died the day they were born? There are tens of thousands of such. Their parentage was against them, their name is against them, the structure of their skulls against them. Their nerves and muscles contaminated by the inebriety or dissoluteness of their parents; they are practically at their birth laid out on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, in an equinoctial gale, and told to make for shore. The first greeting they get from the world is to be called a brat, or a ragamuffin, or a wharf-rat. What to do with them is the question often asked. There is another question quite as pertinent, and that is, what are they going to do with us? They will, ten or eleven years from now, have as many votes as the same number of well-born children, and they will hand this land over to anarchy and political damnation just as surely as we neglect them. Suppose we each one of us save a boy or save a girl. You can do it. Will you? I will. Take a cake of perfumed soap, a fine-toothed comb, and a New Testament, and a little candy, and a prayer, and a piece of cake, and faith in God, and common sense, and begin this afternoon.

How shall we get ready for one or all of these three exploits? We shall make a dead failure if in our own strength we try to save a man or woman or child. But my text suggests where we are to get equipment. ’93The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.’94 Do you know him as a pardoning, merciful, sympathizing God? We must know him through Jesus Christ in our own salvation and then we shall have his help in the salvation of others. And while you are saving strangers you may save some of your own kin, and that will be an exploit worthy of celebration when the world itself is shipwrecked, and the sun has gone out like a spark from a smitten anvil, and all the stars are dead!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage